The Great Recession and the Distribution of Household Income

ISBN: 9780199671021 出版年：2013 页码：296 Oxford University Press

The ‘Great Recession’ was the worst macroeconomic downturn since the 1930s in most OECD countries. In many economies, subsequent recovery has been sluggish, and has sometimes turned into a new recession. The paper in vestigates the effects of the Great Recession on the distribution of household incomes. It shows that the changes between 2007 and 2009 in household incomes in total and on avera ge, in income inequality, and in poverty rates, were modest in most of the countries studied , in spite of the depth of the recession in most countries. This outcome is remarkably differen t from the far more dramatic experience of the Great Depression, although not so different from some recent recessions such as the Nordic crisis of the early 1990s. During the GR, th e household sector was protected from the impact of the downturn by both automatic stabiliser s and additional support of governments through the tax and benefit system. The post-2009 d istributional impacts of the GR are likely to have been considerably larger however, with grea ter differences across countries emerging.