Using Fiscal Data to Estimate the Evolution of Top Income Shares in Belgium

Belgium is notoriously absent from the World Wealth and Income Database (http://wid.world/), the rapidly expanding international source of comparable data for research on income and wealth inequality. This paper reports on a first attempt to fill this gap. We correct and complete published data on net taxable incomes for the period 1990-2013 to comply with the standards set by the WID database, as expressed in the population control and the income control.Our results show that inferring evolutions of the income share of the top 10% or 1% from published tables of net taxable income is highly mi... Mehr ...