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High income and income tax in Colombia, 1993-2010

Revista de Economía Institucional

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Title High income and income tax in Colombia, 1993-2010
Altos ingresos e impuesto de renta en Colombia, 1993-2010
 
Creator Alvaredo, Facundo
Londoño Vélez, Juliana
 
Subject —
income distribution; inequality; personal income tax; Latin America
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distribución de ingresos; desigualdad; impuesto de renta personal; América Latina
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Description We present a series of the distribution of income accruing to the top income groups in Colombia between 1993 and 2010, based on individual income tax data. We obtain four main empirical results. 1) Income in Colombia is highly concentrated, the top 1% of the income distribution accounting for over 20% of total income in 2010. This is at the highest level of inequality in any recent year in the entire WTID sample. 2) High-income individuals in Colombia are, in essence, rentiers and capital owners. 3) While household surveys show that inequality has been decreasing since 2006, tax-based results offer a different picture, where concentration at the top has remained stable; when a survey based on Gini coefficients are adjusted to take into account higher incomes reported in tax returns, inequality levels are higher, and the recent reduction in inequality is less pronounced. 4) Income taxation does little to reduce the high levels of inequality.
Este artículo presenta las series de participación del ingreso de los niveles superiores de la distribución en Colombia entre 1993 y 2010, basadas en datos del impuesto de renta personal. Se obtienen cuatro resultados empíricos principales: 1) el ingreso está altamente concentrado: el 1% más alto captó más del 20% de ingreso total en 2010, el mayor nivel de desigualdad en cualquier año reciente de la muestra WTID; 2) los individuos de altos ingresos son, en esencia, rentistas y propietarios de capital; 3) mientras que las encuestas de hogares muestran que la desigualdad ha disminuido desde 2006, los resultados basados en impuestos muestran que la concentración en la parte superior se ha mantenido estable; cuando los coeficientes de Gini de las encuestas se ajustan para tener en cuenta los ingresos más altos reportados en la declaración de impuestos, la desigualdad es más alta y la reducción de la desigualdad es menos pronunciada; 4) el impuesto de renta poco reduce el alto nivel de desigualdad.
 
Publisher Universidad Externado de Colombia
 
Contributor —
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Date 2014-12-04
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
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Format application/pdf
 
Identifier http://revistas.uexternado.edu.co/index.php/ecoins/article/view/3904
 
Source Revista de Economía Institucional; Vol. 16, Núm. 31 (2014)
2346-2450
0124-5996
 
Language spa
 
Relation http://revistas.uexternado.edu.co/index.php/ecoins/article/view/3904/4198
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Rights Copyright (c) 2014 Facundo Alvaredo, Juliana Londoño Vélez
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0