Les revenus d’un individu pendant une année donnée determinent fortement ceux qu’il aura près deux décennies plus tarde, selon une étude de l’Insee publiée mercredi qui confirme la faiblesse de la mobilité sociale à l’échelle d’une vie en France.
By comparing the income of the same people during the period 2003-2019 using tax data, INSEE finds that the position of people on the income scale in 2019 is close to their position in 2003.
The inertia is particularly strong at the bottom and top of income: between the richest 20% and the poorest 20%, nearly two-thirds of people remain in the same category.
This mobility is much lower than intergenerational mobility, which compares the income of a young adult with that of their parents. “An individual’s income is much less correlated with her parents’ income than it was with his own income 16 years earlier,” the institute concludes.
Immobility is also strong at the top of income: 41% of people in the richest 1% are also rich 16 years later.
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To measure the degree of mobility in France, INSEE compared it with the United States where similar studies are carried out. In this country, the closest study dates from 2013 and measures the mobility of individuals according to income over 20 years.
The authors of this study estimate that the persistence of high-income individuals is 48% in the highest fifth (compared to 62% in France), 40% in the highest tenth (55% in France) and 24 % in the highest hundredth (38% in France).
Very upward mobility is also higher in the United States than in France, with 5% of the poorest moving to the richest category compared to 2% in France. This comparison suggests that mobility throughout life is greater in the United States than in France in all directions.
L’Insee avance plusieurs explanations à cette faible mobilité des revenus en France par rapport aux États-Unis, comme “la forte dépendance de la carrière professionnelle au diploma initial, l’inégalité d’accès à la formation professionnelle ou encore les coûts de la geographic mobility”.
Mobility is stronger for young people and the self-employed. It also varies depending on where you live.
Île-de-France is thus characterized “by very upward and very downward mobility relatively more frequently than in the other regions, as well as by greater persistence among the richest 20% combined with weak persistence among the least affluent 20% ” .
Also noteworthy are the overseas departments “with a particularly high inertia, either among the more affluent or among the less affluent”.
Source: BFM TV
