In the 2022/23 financial year, various measures of inequality in the United Kingdom decreased when compared with 2021/22. The S80/20 ratio fell from 6.3 to 5.5, the P90/10 ratio from 4.5 to 4.2, and the Palma ratio between 1.5 and 1.3.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the wealthiest one percent of people in the United Kingdom controlled 71 percent of net personal wealth, while the top ten percent controlled 93 percent. The share of wealth controlled by the rich in the United Kingdom fell throughout the twentieth century, and by 1990 the richest one percent controlled 16 percent of wealth, and the richest ten percent just over half of it.

The overall wealth of households in the United Kingdom was 13.5 trillion British pounds in the period between 2020 and 2022. Of this overall wealth, the top ten percent of households had over 5.5 trillion pounds of wealth, compared with 13.9 billion owned by the lowest wealth decile.

This GLA Intelligence Update takes a brief look at evidence around the wealth gap in London and examines how this has changed in recent years.

Key Findings

• There is a significant gap between the rich and poor in London, both in terms of their wealth and their income.
• A higher proportion of the wealthiest households are in the South East of England than in London.
• Pension wealth accounts for more than half the wealth of the richest ten per cent of the population.
• In London, the tenth of the population with the highest income have weekly income after housing costs of over £1,000 while people in the lowest tenth have under £94 per week.
• The gap between rich and poor is growing, with the difference between the average income for the second highest tenth and second lowest tenth growing around 14 per cent more than inflation since 2003.

Click on the report below to read

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The data included in the report is available to download here

This dataset encompasses the foundations and findings of a study titled "Housing Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Residential Satisfaction," highlighting the evolution of residential properties from mere consumption goods to significant assets for wealth accumulation. Since the 1980s, with financial market deregulation in the UK, there has been a noticeable shift in homeownership patterns and housing wealth's role. The liberalisation of the banking sector, particularly mortgage lending, facilitated a significant rise in homeownership rates from around 50% in the 1970s to over 70% in the early 2000s, stabilizing at 65% in recent years. Concurrently, housing wealth relative to household annual gross disposable income has seen a considerable increase, underscoring the growing importance of residential properties as investment goods.

The study explores the multifaceted impact of housing wealth on various aspects of life, including retirement financing, intergenerational wealth transfer, health, consumption, energy conservation, and education. Residential satisfaction, defined as the overall experience and contentment with housing, emerges as a critical factor influencing subjective well-being and labor mobility. Despite the evident influence of housing characteristics, social environment, and demographic factors on residential satisfaction, the relationship between housing wealth and satisfaction remains underexplored.

To bridge this gap, the research meticulously assembles data from different surveys across the UK and the USA spanning 1970 to 2019, despite challenges such as data compatibility and measurement errors. Initial findings reveal no straightforward correlation between rising house prices and residential satisfaction, mirroring the Easterlin Paradox, which suggests that happiness levels do not necessarily increase with income growth. This paradox is dissected through the lenses of social comparison and adaptation, theorizing that relative income and the human tendency to adapt to changes might explain the stagnant satisfaction levels despite increased housing wealth.

Further analysis within the UK context supports the social comparison hypothesis, suggesting that disparities in housing wealth distribution can lead to varied satisfaction levels, potentially exacerbating societal inequality. This phenomenon is not isolated to developed nations but is also pertinent to developing countries experiencing rapid economic growth alongside widening income and wealth gaps. The study concludes by emphasizing the significance of considering housing wealth inequality in policy-making, aiming to mitigate its far-reaching implications on societal well-being.

Although China has almost eliminated urban poverty, the total number of Chinese citizens in poverty remains at 82 million, most of which are rural residents. The development of rural finance is essential to preventing the country from undergoing further polarization because of the significant potential of such development to facilitate resource interflows between rural and urban markets and to support sustainable development in the agricultural sector. However, rural finance is the weakest point in China's financial systems. Rural households are more constrained than their urban counterparts in terms of financial product availability, consumer protection, and asset accumulation. The development of the rural financial system faces resistance from both the demand and the supply sides.

The proposed project addresses this challenge by investigating the applications of a proven behavioural approach, namely, Libertarian Paternalism, in the development of rural financial systems in China. This approach promotes choice architectures to nudge people into optimal decisions without interfering with the freedom of choice. It has been rigorously tested and warmly received in the UK public policy domain. This approach also fits the political and cultural background in China, in which the central government needs to maintain a firm control over financial systems as the general public increasingly demands more freedom.

Existing behavioural studies have been heavily reliant on laboratory experiments. Although the use of field studies has been increasing, empirical evidence from the developing world is limited. Meanwhile, the applications of behavioural insights in rural economic development in China remains an uncharted territory. Rural finance studies on the household level are limited; evidence on the role of psychological and social factors in rural households' financial decisions is scarce. The proposed project will bridge this gap in the literature.

The overarching research question of this project is whether and how behavioural insights can be used to help rural residents in China make sound financial decisions, which will ultimately contribute to the sustainable economic development in China. The research will be conducted through field experiments in...

In 2023, the United Kingdom's Gini coefficient score was 33.1, a slight decrease when compared with the previous year. The Gini coefficient is a measurement of inequality within economies, a lower score indicates more equality while a higher score implies more inequality.

This data file includes the Gini coefficient calculated for different wealth welfare aggregates constructed for all Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) datasets in all waves (as of March 2022). It includes Gini coefficients calculated on: • Disposable Net Worth • Value of Principal residence • Financial Assets

This project sought to renew the ESRC's invaluable financial support to LIS (formerly the Luxembourg Income Study) for a period of five more years. LIS is an independent, non-profit cross-national data archive and research institute located in Luxembourg. LIS relies on financial contributions from national science foundations, other research institutions and consortia, data-providing agencies, and supranational organisations to support data harmonisation and enable free and unlimited data access to researchers in the participating countries and to students world-wide. LIS' primary activity is to make harmonised household microdata available to researchers, thus enabling cross-national, interdisciplinary primary research into socio-economic outcomes and their determinants. Users of the Luxembourg Income Study Database and Luxembourg Wealth Study Database come from countries around the globe, including the UK. LIS has four goals: 1) to harmonise microdatasets from high- and middle-income countries that include data on income, wealth, employment, and demography; 2) to provide a secure method for researchers to query data that would otherwise be unavailable due to country-specific privacy restrictions; 3) to create and maintain a remote-execution system that sends research query results quickly back to users at off-site locations; and 4) to enable, facilitate, promote and conduct crossnational comparative research on the social and economic wellbeing of populations across countries. LIS contains the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database, which includes income data, and the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) Database, which focuses on wealth data. LIS currently includes microdata from 46 countries in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australasia. LIS contains over 250 datasets, organised into eight time "waves," spanning the years 1968 to 2011. Since 2007, seventeen more countries have been added to LIS, including the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), Japan, South Korea and a number of other Latin American countries. LWS contains 20 wealth datasets from 12 countries, including the UK, and covers the period 1994 to 2007. All told, LIS and LWS datasets together cover 86% of world GDP and 64% of world population. Users submit statistical queries to the microdatabases using a Java-based job submission interface or standard email. The databases are especially valuable for primary research in that they offer access to cross-national data at the micro-level - at the level of households and persons. Users are economists, sociologists, political scientists, and policy analysts, among others, and they employ a range of statistical approaches and methods. LIS also provides extensive documentation - metadata - for both LIS and LWS, concerning technical aspects of the survey data, the harmonisation process, and the social institutions of income and wealth provision in participating countries. In the next five years, for which support is sought, LIS will: - expand LIS, adding Waves IX (2013) and X (2016), and add new middle-income countries; - develop LWS, adding another wave of datasets to existing countries; acquire new wealth datasets for 14 more countries in cooperation with the European Central Bank (based on the Household Finance and Consumption Survey); - create a state-of-the-art metadata search and storage system; - maintain international standards in data security and data infrastructure systems; - provide high-quality harmonised household microdata to researchers around the world; - enable interdisciplinary cross-national social science research covering 45+ countries, including the UK; - aim to broaden its reach and impact in academic and non-academic circles through focused communications strategies and collaborations.

Average UK household incomes taxes and benefits by household type, tenure status, household characteristics and long-term trends in income inequality.

Provisional estimates of income and inequality measures for financial year ending 2018, alongside historical data.

Total wealth is the sum of the four components of wealth and is therefore net of all liabilities.

Many of Europe's largest economies have seen falling shares of their national wealth taken by the bottom 50 percent of the wealth distribution since the 1990s. Italy in particular stands out as a particularly stark case, as the bottom half owned around 10 percent of the wealth in the country in 1995, while in 2021 they owned only 2.5 percent. Russia is the other country which has seen a consistent decline in the wealth of its poorest 50 percent, with the economic crises of the 1990s causing the poor to rapidly lose their share of wealth, but without any recovery during the years of economic success in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. Germany, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom have seen more moderate decreases in the bottom 50 percent share, with Spain and the UK in fact showing increases in their shares during the early 2000s, as their respective housing booms inflated the wealth of the poorest, before retracting during the financial crisis and great recession. Turkey stands out as an outlier among the large European economies, as the share taken by its bottom half has more than tripled since the 1990s, now having a higher share than in Russia and Italy. This period in Turkey has been marked by rapid economic growth, modernization, and urbanization, some of which has benefitted the poorest by providing new economic opportunities.

The attached file includes data and code used to analyse population scaling and house size in the ancient Near East.

Individual-level estimates of total wealth (July 2010 to March 2020) and regression estimates for the latest survey period.

Ratio of household equivalised income of the top 10 per cent of households to the income of the bottom 10 per cent of households.

Ratio calculated using weekly household income adjusted to take account of differences in numbers and ages of residents.

This dataset is one of the Greater London Authority's measures of Economic Fairness. Click here to find out more.

This dataset is one of the Greater London Authority's measures of Economic Development strategy. Click here to find out more.

In the 3 years to March 2021, black households were most likely out of all ethnic groups to have a weekly income of under £600.

Quarterly data on democratically weighted and CPI-consistent indices, annual inflation rates, expenditure shares and contributions for UK household groups.