Abstract

The paper offers a bird's-eye view of the state of our knowledge about the long-term evolution of income inequality in industrialised countries in the last two centuries. After a brief discussion of the reasons justifying the interest for distributive issues, the two main hypotheses shaping the debate in this century are sketched: the Pareto Law and the Kuznets Curve. Some results of contemporary research in economic history are then examined and integrated with the available information for the postwar period and the more recent years. The latter information shows a trend towards increasing inequality in Sweden, the United States and the United Kingdom in the last years; such trend is, however, not shared by other industrialised economies.