Wage distribution

EUROSTAT provides a measure of equivalised income, where x% of that income makes you roughly equally rich everywhere. We can compare the breakdown of income into deciles in Belgium against the average breakdown of other countries

The first takeaway is that the median income is higher than in other countries. The second takeaway is that our wage distribution is skewed towards the lower deciles. Less people make significantly above average. One could claim that this is a good thing - that high wage disparities would only drive higher class inequality. On the flip side, there are highly valued jobs that would be better compensated if you left Belgium.

In practice we are unfortunately also measuring multiple other effects. Because of the high cost of labour, companies are incentivized to provide tax advantaged benifits to employee's. A very large chunk of this is that up until recently, everyone and their grandma got a company car. Such statistics do not show up in a decile wage distribution.

High income individuals will often start a small company and pay themselves a relatively low wage. A lot of large expenses can be charged to their company, circumventing taxation, and after a few years they can start paying out money that lives on the company balance through tax advantaged rates (liquidatiereserve). There are no easily accessible public statistics on the amount of money that is paid out in this way.

Such a construction is not only fundamentally unfair, it is primarily accessible to people that already have an above average income.

Wealth by age

Though on the whole, it looks like we do quite well at allowing people to build up their wealth throughout their life. This is median wealth by age bracket in Belgium.