INHERITANCE AND THE CHARACTERISTICS OF TOP WEALTH LEAVERS IN BRITAIN.

THE role of inheritance in influencing the distribution of personal wealth in Britain in the 1950s was examined by one of the present authors in an earlier paper.[2] That study compared the pattern of inheritance in the 1950s with the one observed by Wedgwood during the 1920s and concluded that . . . "There was no very marked change in the relative importance of inheritance in the creation of the personal fortunes of the top wealth leavers of the mid-twenties and mid-fifties of this century." The present paper extends Harbury's study to the 1960s to undertake the following tasks: (1) to investigate whether there is any significant difference in the importance of inheritance for the top wealth leavers of 1965 compared with those of a decade earlier, (2) to analyse attributes of the entire post-war data used for the study to discover which specific factors might be associated with the inheritance of substantial fortunes. The distribution of personal wealth in Britain is extremely unequal, much more so than that of income and that of wealth in other advanced countries. Studies based on the estate duty multiplier technique[3] a have indicated a certain reduction in wealth concentration in this century. However, some observers contend that the decline in the share of the richest percentiles in the wealth distribution may be quite misleading, and reflect merely a rearrangement of wealth within families, rather than a redistribution of wealth from rich to poor families.[4] The apparent failure of the high rates of estate duty introduced in the 1940s to bring about a significant reduction in wealth inequality, and the conclusion mentioned earlier that the importance of inheritance in the 1950s was substantially the same as that of the 1920s compels an examination of the possibility that changing rates of duty require a fairly long time to take effect. This question is considered in the first part of this paper by comparing the relative importance of inheritance fo... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]