Inequality and Redistribution in Switzerland: Evidence from Distributional National Accounts
This paper introduces the first Distributional National Accounts (DINA) for Switzerland, spanning the period from 2003 to 2022. This effort integrates comprehensive tax records and survey data with aggregate national accounts to offer a unified, consistent framework for analyzing inequality. Unlike studies based solely on tax statistics, the Swiss DINA captures all income and wealth components, providing a complete picture of distribution trends and moments.
The novel dataset facilitates a deeper understanding of how economic growth is distributed, helps asses progressivity of the complete tax system—including income, corporate, consumption, and the nationally significant wealth tax—and analyzes distributional dynamics by individual characteristics, such as gender and age. Leveraging Switzerland’s fiscally federalized structure, the research also exploits systematic residential sorting by income groups across local jurisdictions with varying tax rates to provide original insights into the distributional effects of intensive tax competition, findings particularly relevant given increasing global taxpayer mobility. The methodology relies on Switzerland's uniquely comprehensive tax declaration requirement, which covers income, wealth, and capital components across the entire population, minimizing the need for imputation.
