PNNL

Abstract

Income distributions are a growing area of interest in the examination of equity impacts brought on by climate change and its responses. Such impacts are especially important at subnational levels, but projections of income distribution at these levels are scarce. We project US state level income distributions by first synthesizing state-level data. We apply a principal components algorithm (Narayan et al., 2023) to projected national Gini coefficients (Rao et al., 2019) and adapt it to the state level to produce projections of the net income distribution. We produce these projections by income decile for three Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) to year 2100 for all 50 states and DC using varying projections of GDP per capita to represent a wide range of possible futures and uncertainty. We use our projections to derive other inequality metrics, namely the Palma ratio. Our net income projections by decile can be used in both emissions- and impact-related research to understand distributional effects at various income levels and identify economically vulnerable populations.