The sharp rise in income inequality in 2021 came mainly because the incomes of the top 10 percent of households in Sweden rose in 2021 by over 16 percent, compared to less than 4 percent for each of the bottom nine deciles of Swedish households. 

“The decile of the population with the highest incomes saw their incomes rise significantly more than the rest of the population during 2021,” Lindberg said. 

Here’s Statistics Sweden’s chart showing how incomes increased in 2021 in the various deciles of earners. 

Daniel Waldenström, an economics professor based at Sweden’s Research Institute for Industrial Economics, said that the sharp jump in income for the most well-off could be explained mainly by them selling shares, property, and other assets after the exceptional rises in prices that year.  

“These are incomes of a one-off nature,” he told the TT newswire, arguing that the rise was more “a manifestation of differences which already existed”, rather than a genuine increase in real inequality. “If you take a broad-brush view, inequality in Sweden hasn’t risen that much for 10-15 years.”

He said that Sweden had seen the sharpest rise in inequality during the Swedish Financial Crisis in the 1990s. 

“It was an extreme situation then, with high unemployment, low economic growth, and a bad economy,” he said.

And here’s the Gini-coefficient going back to 1975, using three different ways of measuring it. 

Mikael Damberg, who was finance minister in 2021, told TT that the rise in inequality in 2021 was not the result of any political decisions, and was likely to be reversed in 2023, as share prices and property prices fall.