Expert Group Report on the Measurement of Inequality and Redistribution  Insee Méthodes N°138 - February 2021

This report on the measurement of inequality and redistribution is the result of the work of some forty experts, brought together at the initiative of INSEE (French National Statistics Institute) on the basis of a mission statement from its Director General, dated 19 March 2019. This group was established in response to two key drivers. On the one hand, the publication, in late 2018, of studies conveying seemingly different messages regarding the comparative extent of redistribution in France and in a number of other developed countries. On the other hand, faced with growing sentiment within society that people are not getting a “fair return on their taxes”, the need to inform the public debate with regard to what taxes are actually used for. Who pays what and how much? Who receives what and in what form? 

It is not just monetary transfers that people receive in return for tax and social security deductions, they also receive social transfers in kind such as free access to health and education, and collective expenditure that benefits the whole population: assessing who benefits from redistribution and who finances it requires a broad overview of what is offered in return for the contributions. 

In order to examine these issues, the expert group was comprised of members from the following institutions: the relevant INSEE directorates (Director of Economic Studies and Reports and Demographic and Social Statistics Directorate); the main academic teams that had fuelled the debates at the end of 2018 or that make regular contributions to the findings on redistribution; the World Inequality Lab (WIL) at the Paris School of Economics; the Institute of Public Policies (IPP); the French Economic Observatory (OFCE); the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policy (LIEPP) at Sciences-Po; several Ministerial Statistical Offices (DREES, DEPP and SIES); the Directorate-General of the French Treasury; and, on an ad hoc basis, the OECD, where an Expert group on Distributional National Accounts (EG DNA) has been working in recent years on the standardisation of national accounts by household category, as regularly published by INSEE.