This introductory chapter presents an overview of the data provided for tewnty OECD countries and the analyses of their earnings distribution over the past 100 years. The analyses draw heavily from the ground-breaking book by Lydall (1968), which continues to provide a most valuable resource for researchers wanting to go back before 1965. A separate chapter is dedicated to each of the twenty countries. Each chapter describes the evidence available on earnings dispersion in the country in question, lists the data in a series of tables with percentiles and, in some cases, decile shares and Gini coefficients, and summarizes the findings in two graphs, covering the upper and lower parts of the distribution.
Keywords: OECD, country data, earnings dispersion, earnings distribution, Lydall,