Our study finds that income inequality among EU-15 citizens decreased remarkably from 1957 to 2017, with the Gini coefficient dropping by nearly 30 per cent. The process was very rapid until the mid-1980s. It then slowed gradually, to the point that inequality started rising at the beginning of the 2000s. The estimates of European income distribution and the inequality measures we compute are based on the method proposed by Sala-i-Martin (2006). This methodology overcomes the problem of the limited availability of long-term survey data on income by using income shares from the World Income Inequality Database.
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