Abstract
Between 1953 and 1985 India implemented various progressive taxes on personal wealth. I use estate tax returns to compute top wealth shares (top 1%, top 0.1% and top 0.01%) over 1966- 1985; a period marked explicitly by a dirigiste policy environment. These new series suggest that wealth concentration in India reduced substantially during the 1970s. Although the decline affected the entire top 1%, the losses faced by the top 0.01% were especially large. Combined with identical trends in top income shares, it appears that the 1950-80 expropriations of India’s rich had similarities to institutional transitions and shocks faced by European elites in the early to mid twentieth century.
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