Name: Comparing income trends across countries
Uploaded: 2020-04-15T18:16:12.000Z
Duration: 5 min 1 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

is to understand how median per capita income after taxes

in comparison to some other countries over a 30-year period.

And the 30-year period for this chart is from 1980 to 2010.

the United States is compared against Canada,

and you can see at the beginning of this time period,

in the United States was higher than that of Canada,

but then over the course of this 30-year period,

it looks like they've gotten pretty close to each other.

So you could say that the rate of increase in Canada

over that period has been higher for this group,

In Norway, we're looking over that same time period again,

between the median per capita incomes after taxes

between the two countries in 1980, and that gap has closed.

hey, the rate of increase of median per capita income

someone making that median per capita income after taxes

in the United States will still be better off

even at the end of our time period, at 2010.

And we see that generally true for all of these countries.

They all have steeper curves, so a higher rate of change,

but the United States, on an absolute level,

has stayed higher, although the gap has gotten smaller

but it's probably leading to other questions.

the people in the middle, the median per capita income.

What about people at other points in the distribution?

and you can see the U.S. curve in this burgundy type color,

and then, instead of showing the median over and over again

over that time period, it just plots the other countries

right over here, so you can see trend in Canada.

At the beginning of the period, the median per capita income

after taxes was lower than that in the United States,

And then we can see the other countries, Norway,

Netherlands, Britain, Sweden, so on and so forth.

even though the rate of improvement is deeper

for these other countries, at least for the median,

you're still better off being in the United States.

But the picture does change a little bit depending on

which countries you look at and which extreme you look at.

You can see that for that fifth percentile,

where if you're in that fifth percentile,

but the rate of improvement is actually similar,

And then you have countries like Ireland where,

in the fifth percentile being in Ireland,

it looks like you were slightly better off.

And then, we can see that trend for the 10th percentile,

and the benefit of being in the United States

over that time period, and the improvement

in inflation-adjusted after tax income over time,

seems to be more dramatic in the United States

than everyone else in 1980, and the gap between

those 95th percentiles has only increased.

Now there's several takeaways that you could have from this.

in some of these other countries is steeper,

especially for some of the lower percentiles,

but folks still have finished up at an absolute lower level.

Another question that some of you might be asking

is why do you see this phenomenon in the United States

that the rate of growth in inflation-adjusted

after tax income over time seems to be highest

for the upper income folks in the United States.

The U.S. does have, relative to many of these countries,

a lower effective highest marginal tax rate.

So for the people in the highest incomes,