Gap Between Rich, Poor Is Biggest in U.S., Study of 17 Wealthy Nations Finds

WASHINGTON —  The United States has the biggest gap between the rich and the poor, says a new study of 17 wealthy industrial countries.

The survey was released Friday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, headquartered in Paris.

The report covers the middle and late 1980s but Timothy M. Smeeding, one of the authors, said the same trends are continuing in the 1990s.

“The trend is toward less equality,” Smeeding, a professor at Syracuse University, told a news conference Friday.

“The places that seem to be experiencing greater equality at this point are Asian countries, particularly Taiwan and South Korea,” he said. Neither country was included in the survey.

The study measured differences between incomes of the top 10% and the bottom 10% of each country’s population, after taxes.

“In the United States, a person who just made it into the highest 10% . . . in 1987 received 5.9 times more income than someone who just fell into the 10% of people with the lowest incomes,” the organization said in a statement.

Of the 17 countries, the smallest gap between rich and poor was reported in Finland.