In G20 countries, the share of the population that earned at least the equivalent of the highest 10 percent of global income earners as of 2022 in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms varies from over two thirds in Australia to only 1.5 percent in Indonesia. The United States recorded the second-highest upper-class share of the G20 countries. However, looking at for instance China, approximately 80 percent of the population counts as middle class or above, whereas just eight percent counts as upper class or higher.

In financial year 2020, over 460 thousand households in Australia had a gross weekly household income of 6,000 Australian dollars or more. On the other end of the spectrum, over 30,000 households had a negative income and around over 32,000 had no income.

The International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) is a continuous programme of cross-national collaboration running annual surveys on topics important for the social sciences. The programme started in 1984 with four founding members - Australia, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States – and has now grown to almost 50 member countries from all over the world. As the surveys are designed for replication, they can be used for both, cross-national and cross-time comparisons. Each ISSP module focuses on a specific topic, which is repeated in regular time intervals. Please, consult the documentation for details on how the national ISSP surveys are fielded. The present study focuses on questions about social inequality.
The release of the cumulated ISSP ´Social Inequality´ modules for the years 1987, 1992, 1999 and 2009 consists of two separate datasets: ZA5890 and ZA5891. This documentation deals with the main dataset ZA5890. It contains all the cumulated variables, while the supplementary data file ZA5961 contains those variables that could not be cumulated for various reasons. However, they can be matched easily to the cumulated file if necessary. A comprehensive overview on the contents, the structure and basic coding rules of both data files can be found in the following guide:

Guide for the ISSP ´Social Inequality´ cumulation of the years 1987,1992, 1999 and 2009

Social Inequality I-IV:

Importance of social background and other factors as prerequisites for personal success in society (wealthy family, well-educated parents, good education, ambitions, natural ability, hard work, knowing the right people, political connections, person´s race and religion, the part of a country a person comes from, gender and political beliefs); chances to increase personal standard of living (social mobility); corruption as criteria for social mobility; importance of differentiated payment; higher payment with acceptance of increased responsibility; higher payment as incentive for additional qualification of workers; avoidability of inequality of society; increased income expectation as motivation for taking up studies; good profits for entrepreneurs as best prerequisite for increase in general standard of living; insufficient solidarity of the average population as reason for the persistence of social inequalities; opinion about own salary: actual occupational earning is adequate; income differences are too large in the respondent´s country; responsibility of government to reduce income differences; government should provide chances for poor children to go to university; jobs for everyone who wants one; government should provide a decent living standard for the unemployed and spend less on benefits for poor people; demand for basic income for all; opinion on taxes for people with high incomes; judgement on total taxation for recipients of high, middle and low incomes; justification of better medical supply and better education for richer people; perception of class conflicts between social groups in the country (poor and rich people, working class and middle class, unemployed and employed people, management and workers, farmers and city people, people at the top of society and people at the bottom, young people and older people); salary criteria (scale: job responsibility, years of education and training, supervising others, needed support for familiy and children, quality of job performance or hard work at the job); feeling of a just payment; perceived and desired social structure of country; self-placement within social structure of society; number of books in the parental home in the respondent´s youth (cultural resources); self-assessment of social class; level of status of respondent´s job compared to father (social mobility); self-employment, employee of a private company or business or government, occupation (ILO, ISCO 1988), type of job of respondent´s father in the respondent´s youth; mother´s occupation (ILO, ISCO 1988) in the respondent´s youth; respondent´s type of job in first and current (last) job; self-employment of respondent´ first job or worked for someone else.

Demograpy: sex; age; marital status; steady life partner; education of respondent: years of schooling and highest education level; current employment status; hours worked weekly; occupation (ILO, ISCO 1988); self-employment; supervising function at work; working-type: working for private or public sector or self-employed; if self-employed: number of employees; trade union membership; highest education level of father and mother; education of spouse or partner: years of schooling and highest education level; current employment status of spouse or partner; occupation of spouse or partner (ILO, ISCO 1988); self-employment of spouse or partner; size of household; household composition (children and adults); type of housing; party affiliation (left-right (derived from affiliation to a certain party); party affiliation (derived from...