Applied Economics Lunch Seminar

Du 19/06/2018 de 12:30 à 13:30

R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris

BONNET Celine(Toulouse School of Economics, INRAE)
SOTURA Aurélie(BdF)

Spatial disparities - France - 1960-2014

This study explores the evolution of spatial inequality in France from 1960 to 2014. It builds on works by Combes & al. (2011) and Roses & al. ( 2016) and shed new light on living standards convergence by using a new and unique database on income distribution of each French textit{départements} since 1960. We have constructed this database using 4500 fiscal tabulations collected in the archives of the French Ministry of Finance, a new demographic database by Bonnet (2018), and income distribution for France computed by Garbinti $&$ al. (2018). First we show that total income inequality in France comes mostly from within textit{départements} inequality and that between textit{départements} income inequality has strongly decreased during the 20th century. Second, while value added per capita inequality, after following an inverted U-shaped relationship from the middle of the 19th century since the 80's, has considerably increased in the last decades, income inequality has decreased then stabilized. We argue that value added per capita inequality in the last decades has increased because value added has concentrated. This, we suspect, stems from agglomeration economies and skill-biased technical change in big cities. We cannot prove it with our data but we do find some evidence such as the fact that top earners have concentrated in urban textit{départements} with big cities in the last decades. Increasing value added per capita inequality did not lead to increasing income divergence between textit{départements} for two reasons: first, retirees relocating to non productive but attractive places have homogenized income sources over the French territory. Second, as we know from Guillot & al. (2016), net wage inequalities have decreased while labor cost inequalities have increased over the 1976-2010 period. Therefore, we believe that taxation has mitigated labor cost inequality leading to smaller spatial income inequality than value added per capita inequality.