Real incomes subsequently grew strongly until 2000 but then fell back and stagnated over the period as a whole. Strikingly, income levels at the bottom of the distribution have developed even less favourably in EU countries with the 10* percentile points lower in the mid-2000s than they were at the beginning of available data series. Possible reasons include employment polarisation between ‘Work-rich” and “work-poor” households (e.g., Gregg et al., It is therefore interesting that market incomes at the 75lh and 90' percentiles have grown less strongly in the United States than in many EU countries.