World Inequality Report 2022

This report was published by the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics on December 7, 2021. It is written by notable economists Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty from the Paris School of Economics, and Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman from the University of California, Berkeley. It presents data contributed by over 100 researchers from across the world on global inequality and factors that contribute to it such as global wealth, income, gender and ecology. This is the second World Inequality Report – the first was published in 2018 – and includes a foreword by economists and Nobel-laureates Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee.The report highlights the income and wealth inequalities that have increased worldwide since the 1980s, largely due to the economic deregulation and liberalisation programmes implemented across nations. It notes that the rise in inequality has been striking in countries such as the United States, Russia and India, and relatively lower in European countries and China. The report states: “inequality is not inevitable, it is a political choice.”The 236-page report is divided into nine chapters: Global economic inequality: insights (Chapter 1); Global inequality from 1820 to now: the persistence and mutation of extreme inequality (Chapter 2); Rich countries, poor governments (Chapter 3); Global wealth inequality: the rise of multimillionaires (Chapter 4); Half the sky? The Female Labor Income Share from a Global Perspective (Chapter 5); Global carbon inequality (Chapter 6); The road to redistributing wealth (Chapter 7); Taxing Multinationals or Taxing Wealthy Individuals? (Chapter 8); and Global vs Unilateral Perspectives on Tax Justice (Chapter 9).