Different developments in private sector incomes lie behind these divergent experiences, but also policy choices. It is instructive to compare the experience of Germany and the United Kingdom, two countries that were faced with large increases in inequality of market incomes between the 1980s and the 2000s. In Germany, high unemployment rates following reunification contributed to a rise in the Gini for private sector incomes by +0.100 from 1981 to 2004. However, the country’s relatively generous unemployment benefit system off set much of this increase, and inequality of disposable incomes grew only modestly (+0.034). By contrast, inequality of market incomes rose somewhat less sharply in the United Kingdom (+0.095), but at the same time the British tax and transfer system absorbed much less of the increase, leading to steeper increase in inequality of disposable incomes by +0.075 between 1979 and 2004.