Lugar: Sala de Reuniones del Departamento de Economía. Edificio Los Madroños, 2ª planta (ECON-2026)

Ponente: Sara Torregrosa Hetland (UPNA)

Título: Taxing workers through the 20th century

Abstract: The expansion of taxes on wage labour is one important piece in the growth of modern 20th century states. Wage labour emerged as an essential source of state finance as wages raised over subsistence and the employed labour force expanded (Kemmerling, 2009). Wages were taxed through different instruments, some directly related to social security benefits, with implications for the development of diverse fiscal contracts.

In order to study these processes, this paper constructs and compares series of the tax burden placed on the labor income of workers during the period 1910-1970 in a sample of five Western countries (France, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States). The series include income taxes and social contributions, and are estimated for diverse representative working households, defined in relation to the average wage in the economy. The framework follows the definitions of existing series for more recent years at the OECD’s Taxing Wages (which starts for 1979; see OECD, 1984) and the EuroPTax database (starting in 1958; Lynch and Weingarten, 2010). Our series are constructed to allow consistent comparisons across countries and through time, linking with the OECD data which covers up to present day.