From August 2018 to December 2024 I was the lead investigator of the project "The Swedish transition to equality: income inequality with new micro data, 1862–1970", financed by Handelsbankens forskningsstiftelser and the Swedish Research Council. The other two project participants were Jakob Molinder (Lund/Uppsala) and Svante Prado (University of Gothenburg).
The project aims are summarized below in Swedish and English. Below that you can find information about ongoing work within the project.
Sammanfattning
Sverige utmärkte sig under efterkrigstiden som ett av världens mest jämlika länder. Hur det blev så vet vi förvånansvärt lite om: tillgängliga data före 1968 berör endast toppinkomsttagare eller enskilda platser. Baserat på ett unikt och tidigare outnyttjat inkomsttaxeringsmaterial presenterar det här projektet den första beräkningen av hela den svenska befolkningens inkomster mellan 1860 och 1970. Statistiken gör det möjligt att utvärdera olika faktorers betydelse för ojämlikhetens utveckling över det långa loppet. Projektet bidrar således med nya insikter om den svenska inkomstfördelningens utveckling och med en förståelse för dess drivkrafter som är unik i ett internationellt perspektiv.
Purpose and aims
The growth of inequality in developed countries since the 1980s has directed a great deal of scholarly attention to the distribution of incomes and wealth, with particular focus how inequality has evolved historically. Recent research explores determinants of inequality such as labour markets (Williamson and Lindert 2016), wars and capital destruction, taxation (Piketty 2014), diseases and disasters (Scheidel 2017), and waves of globalization and politics (Milanovic 2016).
The focus of this project is the long-run evolution of the Swedish income distribution. Sweden plays a special role in research on inequality and welfare states owing to its reputation as uniquely equal (Lindbeck 1997; Andersson 2015). Yet a central question that arises is: how deep are the roots of Swedish equality? Until recently, researchers have focussed on changes since the late 1960s, showing that the expansion of the welfare state narrowed the distribution of income (Korpi and Palme 1998). This short timeframe is a direct consequence of the fact that the first Standard of Livings Survey (LNU) only was made in 1968.
A more history-oriented strand of research has examined the income distribution for shorter time spans before the 1970s with recourse to information provided by Statistics Sweden on taxable income tabulated for broad income groups (Benzel 1952; Spånt 1975; Gustafsson and Johansson 2003). Their results, however, are compromised by two shortcomings with regard to the tax data used: (1) the distribution within income ranges is unknown; and (2) the ranges are not organised systematically over time. In response, researchers have resorted to top incomes, since these have been consistently reported over the years. Roine and Waldenström (2008), for instance, show that the share of the upper ten per cent has declined dramatically in Sweden since 1903. Yet top-income shares reveal nothing about distributional changes that affect the bottom 90 per cent, which may have far-reaching negative implications for our understanding of inequality (Garbinti et al. 2017).
We will provide a substantially improved and detailed view of Swedish inequality by looking directly into the original, individual tax returns sent to Statistics Sweden, presently stored at the National Archive (Riksarkivet). We will estimate incomes for the full Swedish population using the social tables method, employed with great success in recent estimates of income inequality in the US, the UK, and Germany as far back as the eighteenth century (Lindert and Williamson 2016, Gomez-Leon and de Jong 2017). The method combines (1) the distribution of the population in sectors, occupations, and social groups from population censuses, and (2) income estimates for each group. It will allow us to provide new and unique decadal estimates of Gini-coefficients, top incomes, bottom incomes, regional differences, gender differences, and urban-rural differences for the entire Swedish population from 1862 to 1970. The estimates for 1970 will be linked up with existing data to produce one of the longest and most qualitative series of income inequality for any country. By providing uniquely rich data on the Swedish income distribution, this project will make a major contribution to the international debate on inequality and its determinants.
Publications and accepted for publication (updated August 2025)
* = not project participant
All publications are Open Access.
Erik Bengtsson and Patrick Svensson* (SLU), “The living standards of the labouring classes in Sweden, 1750–1900: evidence from rural probate inventories”. Presented at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Agricultural History Society, Washington D.C., 5-6 June 2019; Rural History, Paris, September 2019; the Economic History Seminar in Gothenburg, November 2019; Dept of Economic History, Uppsala University 4 November 2019. Published in the Agricultural History Review Volume 70, Number 1, June 2022, pp. 49-69. Read here.
Erik Bengtsson and Marc Morgan* (University of Geneva and World Inequality Lab), “Does Democratization Cause Redistribution? Evidence from Sweden and Brazil”. Book chapter in Jorge Álvarez and Svante Prado (eds.). Scandinavia and South America – A Tale of Two Capitalisms. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, published October 2022. The book is published open access and available here.
Erik Bengtsson and Anton Svensson* (Lund), “Income Inequality in an Industrial City during the Great Leveling: Individual-Level Evidence from Malmö, 1900-1950”. Scandinavian Economic History Review, no. 1 2023, pp. 80-95. Read here.
Rolf Aaberge* (Statistics Norway) and Erik Bengtsson, “Long-run Income Inequality in the Nordic Countries”. Published in the Scandinavian Economic History Review, pre-published online 26 October 2023. Read here.
Svante Prado, Jesper Hamark* (Borås/Gothenburg) and Kristoffer Collin* (Gothenburg), "A new benchmark for industrial wages in mid-1880s Sweden", published in Essays in Economic and Business History vol. 42 no. 1 (2024). Read here.
Erik Bengtsson and Jakob Molinder, “What Happened to the Rich during the Great Levelling? Evidence from Swedish Individual-level Data, 1909–1950”. Presented at Department of Economic History, Uppsala, 11 November 2019, at IFN in Stockholm, November 2019, at Höstmötet in Gothenburg, November 2019; at SOFI, Stockholm University, April 2020; at Bonn University, May 2020. Journal of Economic History, June 2025. Read here.
Erik Bengtsson and Jakob Molinder, “Incomes and Income Inequality in Stockholm, 1870–1970”. Presented at the Swedish Economic History Meeting, Gothenburg, October 2021; the Economic History Society annual conference, Cambridge, 3 April 2022 (programme here); Paris School of Economics Economic History Seminar (programme here), 30 March 2022; Lund University Department of Economic History "Makromackan" seminar, June 2022. Pre-published online in Explorations in Economic History, 8 December 2023. Read here.
Johan Ericsson* and Jakob Molinder, “How Deep Are the Roots of Swedish Egalitarianism? A Multidimensional Approach”. European Review of Economic History, published online 23 July 2025. Read here.
Erik Bengtsson and Felix Kersting* (Humboldt U, Berlin) “The Social Origins of Democracy and Authoritarianism Reconsidered: Prussia and Sweden in Comparison”. Presented at the European Historical Economics Society Conference, 1-2 September 2023, Vienna, the 15th Swedish Economic History Meeting, Lund, 27-29 September 2023, University of Duisburg-Essen, January 2024, the Historical Study of States and Regimes Research Lab, 19 January 2024, and the Virtual Workshop in Historical Political Economy, 2 May 2024. Pre-published online in Comparative Political Studies, 10 July 2025. Read here.
Working papers and submitted
Erik Bengtsson, Daniel Waldenström (IFN)* and Enrico Rubolino (Essex)*, “What Determines the Capital Share over the Long Run of History?”. Presented in Lund, Luxembourg, Stockholm, Marseille, International Macro History Online Seminar, 18 November 2020, World Inequality Lab second conference, Paris, December 2021, University of Chicago, University of Michigan, April 2022. Published as IZA Discussion Paper 13199, April 2020: read here.
Jakob Molinder, “Historical roots of the dual-earner model: Women’s labour force participation in Sweden, 1870–1960”. Lund Papers in Economic History No. 244, February 2023. Read here. Submitted to an economic history journal.
Ongoing work
Erik Bengtsson, Jakob Molinder and Svante Prado, “Income Inequality and Structural Transformation: Evidence from Swedish Micro Data, 1870–1970”. Ongoing work. Presented at Economic History Society conference, Belfast, April 2019; European Historical Economics Society conference, Paris, August 2019, the 13th Swedish Economic History Meeting, Uppsala, October 2019; the European Social Science History Conference, Gothenburg, 14 April 2023; European Historical Economics Society, Vienna, 1-2 September 2023; the Swedish Economic History Meeting, Lund, 26-27 September 2023; Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, October 2023; Höstmötet, Malmö, 7-8 November 2023, Utrecht University, March 2024; Danish Society for Economic and Social History workshop, Aalborg, 1 November 2024. Will be presented at Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, 9 April 2024.
Svante Prado, Jakob Molinder, Erik Bengtsson. “New National Accounts for Sweden from the Income Side: Sweden 1870–1920”. Ongoing work,has been presented at the European Social Science History Conference, Gothenburg, April 2023, the Swedish Economic History Meeting, Lund, 28-29 September 2023, the International Conference AGRICLIOMETRICS, Montevideo, Uruguay, 7-8 December 2023; will be presented at the 5th Annual Meeting of the Scandinavian Society for Economic and Social History, Oslo, 24-25 October 2024.
Jakob Molinder, Edvin Syk* and Max Thaning* (Stockholm), “Income Inequality and Social Class in Sweden, 1920–2020”. Ongoing work.
Jakob Molinder and Suvi Heikkuri* (Gothenburg) “Building the Middle: Changing Skill Composition in Sweden, 1870–1970”. Ongoing work.
Data publications
Erik Bengtsson, “Agrar ojämlikhet i Sverige studerad med bevillningstaxeringen som källa, 1870–1920”. A Swedish-language exploration, with an English-language abstract, of the source-value of the post-1862 property tax lists for the study of agrarian wealth inequality in Sweden. Lund Papers in Economic History No. 242, December 2022. Read here.
Erik Bengtsson, “Inkomstskatternas historia i Sverige 1862–1950 och deras källvärde för inkomst- och ojämlikhetsberäkningar”. Ongoing work.
Project data used by other researchers
Suvi Heikkuri, doctoral student in Gothenburg, uses our income data to classify jobs in different pay categories and analyze pay differentials. See her paper "The Skill Premium in Sweden, 1900–1950", presented at the Economic History Society Conference in Newcastle, April 2024. Published as WP in April 2024: Göteborg Papers in Economic History 40, read here.
Marcos Castillo, doctoral student in Lund, uses our income data for 1870 to calculate the income effects of emigrating to the United States depending on your job in Sweden. Find Marcos's dissertation here.
William Skoglund, doctoral student in Uppsala, uses project income data to analyze regional determinants of wages.
Jonatan Andersson, Uppsala University, uses project data in his doctoral dissertation. See Jonatan's and Jakob's working paper "Did Cities Increase Skills During Industrialization? Evidence from Rural-Urban Migration".