14 
y D must often be more or less high,so that the Pareto 
pattern will be confined to a rather narrow range of the 
income distribution while in the case of wealth it usually 
extends to almost the whole of the assessed wealth data. 
This, it is true, partly results from the fact that the 
wealth data are more truncated than the income data,in 
view of the underlying tax laws. 
Income and Wealth:Empirical Patterns 
The following illustrations are based on the cross 
classification of income and wealth available in Holland 
and in Sweden. These data share certain characteristics 
found also in other cross section data on size 
distributions given in official publications.The first 
feature is that the great bulk of the observations is 
concentrated in the corner of the first (the north-east 
quadrant). In other words the distributions are very skew. 
A great many of the units are small in either dimension. 
The second feature is that the wealth distribution is 
heavily truncated (in Sweden, for example, at 150.000 
crowns) while the income distribution is given down to 
rather low levels. To put it in another way,only a small 
proportion of all income earners are assessed for wealth.