Zróżnicowanie ekonomiczne właścicieli ziemskich w powiecie grodzieńskim w końcu XVIII wieku
Economic diversity of landowners in the poviat of Grodno at the end of the eighteenth century

Summary/Abstract: The article is devoted to economic inequalities among the landowners of the poviat of Grodno in the late eighteenth century. The source basis for the research is made up of the protocols of the Perpetual Offering to the Army, also known as the ‘offering of the tenth grosz’, an early income tax imposed on the owners of the secular and Church estates. The results show a very high wealth differentiation among the researched population. In addition to a small and very wealthy elite in the poviat, there was a large number of petty nobility (three-fourths of the surveyed population) with estates so small that they were exempted from the tax due to insufficient income. The Gini coefficient values describing the income concentration in the county are around 0.95 and do not change much when the method of income calculation is modified.

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