The impact of different data sources on the level and structure of income inequality (original) (raw)

Recent Trends in Spanish Income Distribution: A Robust Picture of Falling Income Inequality

2001

We would like to thank Josep Pérez García for his computing support and to the participants at the Workshop Fighting Poverty and Inequality through Tax-Benefit Reforms: Empirical Approaches for their comments. We acknowledge financial support from the Fundación de las Cajas de Ahorro Confederadas (FUNCAS). References Appendices Appendix 1. Components of the real net household income Appendix 2. Income distribution, 1985-1996 Appendix 3. Definition of the variables used in the decomposition analyses of section 4 2 This is the evidence obtained from the EPF (Encuesta de Presupuestos Familiares, Spanish Family Expenditure Survey) or from the ECPF (Encuesta Continua de Presupuestos Familiares, Spanish Family Expenditure Survey-interviews are held every three months) data. However, studies based on fiscal administrative records (i.e. el panel de declarantes del IRPF) find the opposite trend-see,

Economic inequality in Spain: the european community household panel dataset

Spanish Economic Review, 2007

Economic Inequality in Spain: The European Community Household Panel Dataset This article uses data from the 1998 European Community Household Panel to study economic inequality in Spain. It reports data on the Spanish distributions of income, labor income, and capital income, and on related features of inequality, such as age, employment status, educational attainment, and marital status. It also reports data on the income mobility of Spanish households, and data on income inequality in other European countries and in the U.S. We find that income, earnings, and, very especially, capital income are very unequally distributed in Spain and that economic inequality in Spain is well above the European average.

Economic Inequality in Spain: The European Union Household Panel Dataset

Regional economic growth in Portugal has mainly been studied from the perspective of convergence with data ending by the early 2000’s. The country as a whole has stopped converging to the output levels of the richest European countries by this period and has also become one of the most unequal EU member-states in terms of income distribution in the meantime. It is thus important to analyze the growth performance at the regional level in a more recent period, 1995-2007, emphasizing regional disparities in inequality as explanatory factors. This study examines the relationship between inequality and regional growth in Portugal at NUTS III level exploring the explanatory power of earnings and education inequality measures computed with data from the Quadros de Pessoal database. The results point to a positive relationship between initial inequality and regional growth, stronger for education than for earnings inequality, but with earnings inequality measures revealing a higher explanat...

Intertemporal and interprovincial variations in income inequality: Spain, 1973–1991

Regional Studies, 2002

GOERLICH F. J. and MAS M. (2002) Intertemporal and interprovincial variations in income inequality: Spain, 1973, Reg. Studies 36, 1005-1015. The paper presents the main findings on personal income distribution for the Spanish provinces over the period 1973-91. The information comes from the three structural Household Budget Surveys and has been elaborated by the authors on a homogeneous base (available at: http://www.ivie.es). It starts by reviewing the information provided by some dispersion statistics, including kernel density functions, applied to the provincial Gini indices and Lorenz percentiles. It goes on to test, making use of an ANOVA model, two propositions related with intertemporal and interprovincial variations in inequality. The penultimate section, before the conclusions, deals with the estimation of b-convergence equations in inequality.

Inequality of opportunity and income inequality in Spain: An analysis over time

The aim of this paper is to contribute both theoretically and empirically to the study of Inequality of Opportunity in Spain. The analysis is carried out using microdata collected by the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), which incorporate a wide variety of personal harmonised variables, allowing comparability with other countries. The availability of this database for years 2004 and 2010 is particularly relevant to analyse the impact of the economic crisis, the empirical evidence shows signi ficant increases in both income inequality (17.24%) and, more signi cantly, inequality of opportunity (62.34%). According to our fi ndings, the eff ect of circumstances on income distribution has intensifi ed between the twoyears.

Sticky income inequality in the Spanish transition (1973-1990)

This paper investigates the evolution of income inequality in Spain during its transition to democracy, suggesting a method for the correction of under-reporting of earnings and profits in the Household Budget Surveys' data. The contribution is twofold: the methodological proposal, based on incomeexpenditure discrepancy and scaling-up to National Accounts, improves on previous work, and can be convenient for similar historical sources in other countries. Secondly, its application results in an alternative history of the distribution of income in this case, changing the levels and also the observed trend. Previous literature asserted a substantial equalization, related to the democratization process, while after the adjustment inequality in disposable income is shown to have been quite persistent.

Inequality in Spain, 1973-91: Contribution to a Regional Database

Review of Income and Wealth, 2001

This paper provides the methodology and results of a database of inequality indices for the fifty provinces and seventeen regions of Spain on the basis of the Household Budget Surveys for the years 1973͞74, 1980͞81 and 1990͞91. The inequality indicators considered are the indices of Gini, Theil (0), Theil (1) and Atkinson (1), as well as the distribution by deciles of the population. These indicators are drawn up for three variables: total income, total expenditure, and exclusively monetary expenditure. The variables are also expressed in terms of households, per capita and per capita equivalent. All are available on the Internet (http:͞͞www.ivie.es).

Accounting for the decline in Spanish household expenditures inequality during the 1980s

Spanish Economic Review, 2001

In this paper we apply decomposition methods to analyze some of the factors accounting for the decrease in household expenditures inequality in Spain during the 1980s. We adopt a simple one-parameter model in which equivalence scales depend only on household size. Then we propose an inequality decomposition method which minimizes equivalence scales' potential contamination problems. We find that most of the change in overall inequality is due to a reduction in the within-group term in the partition by household size. The bulk of this reduction is accounted for by changes at the lower tail of the distribution in the partitions by the socioeconomic category and educational level of the household head. These two findings are independent of the equivalence scales parameter.

EQUALITAS Working Paper No. 51 The driving forces of rising inequality in Spain: Is there more to it than a deep worsening of low income households’ living standards?

This paper describes the evolution of inequality and living standards and their driving forces in Spain during a period of more than thirty years. Since the beginning of the crisis Spain has been the OECD country where both market and disposable income inequality have grown faster and annual real income growth has showed its most regressive pattern ever since 1973. During the last decade, Spain suffered one of the largest decreases in mean household incomes due to the Great Recession and is the OECD country where the gap between the income slice of those in the highest decile and those in lowest has widened the most. We disentangle the main driving forces of this relevant rise in inequality (employment trends, earnings growth and the role of redistributive policies) and discover the trends in living standards of ordinary working-age households, particularly those around and below the middle of the distribution.