Well, I know where to get inflation, growth series for France (e.g. www.insee.fr). But inequality is much harder to summarize with a single indicator. INSEE does regular studies in France, but the frequency is far lower than yearly (like, every 5 years) and the indicators do not all remain the same making comparison very hard over 10, 15 years. Generational accounting is only coming into the spot lights now, and we certainly won't find any retrospective series on this at this point (and probably not anytime soon in France).
For other countries, which we would need to make correlations significant , the same series that are easy for France would be easy too. But I am even more clueless as to how to get the others. I remember one graph from Jérôme with the income of the top US percentile, we could lay it in a table of approximate numbers. But that is still only one country.
At this point I'm thinking, correlation with such simple series as inflation and growth have certainly been run already... I'm gonna go googling ! Pierre
As I read it, the countries that did relatively well did not change their income inequality much but those who did change it fared worse. But to which direction we cannot tell. Orthodoxy is not a religion.
http://www.aeconf.net/Articles/May2002/aef030105.pdf
Very high in google, not sure it really warrants of its worth. Although observing that the debtor-creditor scenario can make inflation beneficial to the middle class (which has access to credit), global empirical data suggest that inflation is bad for inequalities (because the really poor don't have access to credit to take advantage of the inflation ? and because the rich move faster to adapt to it ?), even filtering out data points where it's actually hyper-inflation wrecking an entire country.
There is also this: http://www.eldis.org/static/DOC4760.htm from the IMF, so probably heavily loaded also (it says max growth = good for the poor, whatever the rest), but it gets wrung at: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/06/is_inequality_a.html (again, don't know exactly what it's worth).
So there are many references to well formatted data series in these papers, but eventually the conclusion after critical reading seems to be that ... there is no general, worldwide, significant link between anything.
OK, I go back to sleep ! Pierre
