Demographic changes – are they the reason for increasing inequality?

Greve, Bent and Hussain, M. Azhar (2025) Demographic changes – are they the reason for increasing inequality? INTERSECTIONS: EAST EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIETY AND POLITICS, 11 (2). pp. 183-204. ISSN 2416-089X

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Abstract

A high degree of equality has for a long time been a central feature of the Nordic welfare states – Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. This article shows that the overall increasing levels of inequality only to a limited degree can be explained by changes in demographic factors such as more elderly people, more living alone, an increasing share participating in longer-term education, and rising levels of assortative mating. There thus seems to be a small impact of demographic changes. Therefore, one also needs to be aware of the impact of political decisions when explaining development in inequality though a large part of inequality development is still unexplained. There are differences in the impact on inequality between the Nordic countries, although the countries belong to the same welfare regime cluster, which implies that even if demographic changes have an impact one needs to look into other factors as well in order to explain observed changes in all countries included in the analysis.

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