Social class and wealth inequality in Italy over 20 years, 1993–2014

Abstract

Italy is facing its worst economic crisis since the Second World War. As many studies have already shown, the crisis is affecting the country's social class structure, thus accentuating several inequality tendencies. In this connection, the empirical purposes of the paper are twofold: i) to analyze whether accumulation and inequality in wealth are growing or declining in absolute terms; ii) to investigate the relationship between social class and wealth inequality. To this end, we adopt a longitudinal approachviz., we take the 1993-2014 period into account by using data from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth. Our findings suggest that overall net worth has trended down in the years following the beginning of the crisis (since 2010), and that inequality in wealth has basically been increasing during the twenty-year period, with a decline from 2012 on. However, there has been no persistent social splitting process in wealth distribution by social class. Rather, there is a high (and increasing) level of domestic differentiation in terms of household wealth by class, mainly within the lower class and self-employed middle class, which could put further stress on social cohesion standards and allow new forms of social vulnerability to emerge.