Incomes in Göteborg 1925-1958

SND-ID: SND 0783

Creator/Principal investigator(s)

Björn Gustafsson - University of Gothenburg, Department of Social Work

Mats Johansson - Institute for Future Studies

Description

The aim of this study is to throw light on why inequality in the distribution of income in Sweden fell from the mid-1920s to the second part of the 1950s. For this reason the project decided to collect income information referring to different years from a sample of households for one Swedish city. A database was created by coding tax records and other documents for the city of Göteborg, the second largest city in Sweden.

The determination of which years to investigate was critical. For analysing changes over time it was thought as essential to have roughly equal numbers of years between years studied. Further, it was thought advisable to avoid years with too much macroeconomic turmoil as well as the years of the two World Wars. Balancing the resources for the data collection between the size of a sub sample and the number of subsamples, it was decided to assemble data for four years. The years 1925, 1936, 1947 and 1958 was chosen to investigate. It should be pointed out that the year 1947 was preferred to the following years as large social insurance reforms leading to increases in pension b

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Language

Swedish

Research principal, contributors, and funding

Research principal

University of Gothenburg

Responsible department/unit

Department of Social Work

Funding

  • Funding agency: Swedish Council for Social Research
Protection and ethical review

Data contains personal data

No

Method and time period

Unit of analysis

Population

Households in Göteborg

Sampling procedure

The local tax authorities kept a manual register of all persons registred as residing in the city of Göteborg. The register was started in 1917 and was in use up to 1967 when it was computerised. From this register it was possible to obtain a random sample (applying no age limit) by drawing persons who were born on two specific days of the year, and including members of their households. This master sample thus contains persons who were living in the city during the period 1917 to 1967. From this sample subsamples were derived for each year under study by selecting all persons in the master sample that lived in Göteborg during that particular year. This means that the samples for each specific year contain 2/365 (plus their families) of the people living in Göteborg during the specific calendar year. During the period Göteborg municipality expanded several times, in the database Göteborg is always defined according to the boundaries relevant respective year.

Time period(s) investigated

1925-01-01 – 1958-12-31

Geographic coverage

Geographic spread

Geographic location: Göteborg Municipality

Geographic description: Göteborg

Topic and keywords

Research area

Income, property and investment/saving, HISTORY (CESSDA Topic Classification)
Social Sciences, Economic History (The Swedish standard of fields of research 2011)

Publications
Dataset 1
Incomes in Göteborg 1925

Version 2.0

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Citation

Björn Gustafsson, Mats Johansson. University of Gothenburg (2011). Incomes in Göteborg 1925. Swedish National Data Service. Version 2.0. https://doi.org/10.5878/001101

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Data format / data structure

Numeric

Creator/Principal investigator(s)

Björn Gustafsson - University of Gothenburg, Department of Social Work

Mats Johansson - Institute for Future Studies

Time period(s) investigated

1925 – 1925

Variables

70

Number of individuals/objects

6845

Dataset 2
Incomes in Göteborg 1936

Version 2.0

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Citation

Björn Gustafsson, Mats Johansson. University of Gothenburg (2011). Incomes in Göteborg 1936. Swedish National Data Service. Version 2.0. https://doi.org/10.5878/001103

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Data format / data structure

Numeric

Creator/Principal investigator(s)

Björn Gustafsson - University of Gothenburg, Department of Social Work

Mats Johansson - Institute for Future Studies

Variables

78

Number of individuals/objects

7741

Dataset 3
Incomes in Göteborg 1947

Version 2.0

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Citation

Björn Gustafsson, Mats Johansson. University of Gothenburg (2011). Incomes in Göteborg 1947. Swedish National Data Service. Version 2.0. https://doi.org/10.5878/001105

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Data format / data structure

Numeric

Creator/Principal investigator(s)

Björn Gustafsson - University of Gothenburg, Department of Social Work

Mats Johansson - Institute for Future Studies

Variables

66

Number of individuals/objects

7921

Dataset 4
Incomes in Göteborg 1958

Version 2.0

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Citation

Björn Gustafsson, Mats Johansson. University of Gothenburg (2011). Incomes in Göteborg 1958. Swedish National Data Service. Version 2.0. https://doi.org/10.5878/001107

Download citation

Data format / data structure

Numeric

Creator/Principal investigator(s)

Björn Gustafsson - University of Gothenburg, Department of Social Work

Mats Johansson - Institute for Future Studies

Variables

57

Number of individuals/objects

9934

Published: 2002-01-01
Last updated: 2019-02-06