In this post, Salvatore Morelli, director of the Stone Center’s GC Wealth Project and an associate professor in public economics in the Law Department at the Roma Tre University, announces the launch of the GC Wealth Project website.
By Salvatore Morelli
“Statistics on wealth distribution play a key political role…[and are] as sensitive an issue as the balance of payments or unemployment figures. This means that it is all the more important that they should be firmly based. We should examine critically the evidence and the assumptions underlying it.”
— Tony Atkinson, The Concentration of Wealth in Britain (1978)
The study of wealth — and of wealth inequality and its taxation — is now understood as central to our understanding of household well-being and to the functioning of our macroeconomy. Unequal distribution of wealth brings about unequal command over productive resources, and extreme wealth concentration compounds other socio-economic inequalities, reduces intergenerational mobility, and damages the democratic process.
For researchers and policymakers who work within the broad field of economic inequality research, it is essential to have up-to-date research and data on wealth, including its composition, distribution, and taxation. However, even though wealth data have become more accessible, particularly in the last two decades, they remain far less developed and extensive than data on income.
Today the Stone Center at the Graduate Center, CUNY, is launching the GC Wealth Project website, the result of our multi-year effort aimed at expanding and consolidating access to the most up-to-date research and data on wealth, wealth inequalities, and wealth transfers and related tax policies, across countries and over time. On this site, you will find material that is seldom available in an accessible format.
In gathering, curating, standardizing, and structuring this material, the GC Wealth Project Team has developed novel empirical evidence on wealth, wealth inequality, and wealth-related taxation. One of our key findings is that wealth levels, trends, and distributions are complex and multifaceted, with all aspects of wealth shaped by a multitude of factors operating at both the micro and macro levels.
Our goal has been to gather a diversity of wealth-related data in one place. A core part of our philosophy is to emphasize that data and methods matter a lot, yet rarely, if ever, is there a single value, carved in stone, for any one wealth indicator.
We do not mean that researchers cannot or should not select and make use of a single value, or that it isn’t often desirable or necessary to do so. What we mean is that, in our view, researchers should have access to options — and hand-in-hand with those options, they should have information that enables them to select the indicator or series that best fits their goals. That insight has motivated this project throughout its development.
The GC Wealth Project site is organized around two main components. The first is a data warehouse of gathered and novel data that can be visualized in a variety of ways through the interactive dashboard, and which focuses on four areas: Wealth Topography; Wealth Inequality Trends; Estate, Inheritance, and Gift Taxes; and (coming later this year) Inheritance Trends. All of the data, as well as the tailored visualizations that users can create via the interactive dashboard, can be exported.
The second component is our Digital Library of Research on Wealth Inequality, a large, comprehensive database, that includes abstracts and (when possible) full texts of important, innovative, and high-quality articles, chapters, and books focused on wealth inequality.
We invite you to explore the site and experiment with the interactive dashboard. And we’d love to hear from you. Please send your feedback and questions to wealthdata@gc.cuny.edu.
Read more about the GC Wealth Project: