This chapter presents tables of data on New Zealand and an account of its increased earnings distribution. It shows that although New Zealand is often presented as having experienced dramatic distributional changes, the evidence on the distribution of earnings is limited in its coverage of the post-war period. Estimates exist for the period 1984 to 1997, during which the bottom decile fell and the top decile rose significantly. Going back to the 1970s and earlier, there is some indication that the Golden Age in New Zealand benefited the top decile relative to the median.
Keywords: country data, data sources, earnings distribution, Golden Age, earnings dispersion,