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Comparable Indicators of Inequality Across Countries

4. Available Data on Income Inequality

Data on income distribution trends over time within a given country have improved in many cases, with ex-
amples including Britain’s annual income distribution statistics, the so-called Households Below Average Income
series (Department for Work and Pensions, 2010). In addition, as Jenkins and Van Kerm (2009) emphasize, sub-
stantial progress has been made in producing harmonized data on income inequality incorporating a high degree of
comparability The ability to make reliable cross-national comparisons of income has been substantially advanced
by the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS - see
http://www.lisproject.org), a cross-national data archive located
in Luxembourg bringing together micro-data for a large number of countries, and exploited in a wide range of
comparative studies (see for example Atkinson, Rainwater and Smeeding, 1995). This now covers more than 30
countries with datasets that span up to three decades, as shown in Table 1 focusing on countries covered by the
GINI project.9 While the concepts and variables have been harmonized to the greatest extent possible, the fact that
the datasets are drawn from different national surveys inevitably means that some sources of non-comparability
cannot be addressed after the event. While researchers can access the microdata directly (though only remotely, by
submitting commands electronically, rather than by downloading the data), summary indicators of income inequal-
ity and poverty produced from the database are also presented on the LIS website in an excel spreadsheet entitled
“LIS Key Figures”.

Another important source of summary measures of income inequality and poverty (though not of microdata)
across countries and over time is provided by OECD. The OECD has collected data on income inequality on a
number of occasions from its member countries, supplied using national data sources but to a common template.
This has served as the basis for various OECD studies on the topic, most recently the widely-cited Growing Un-
equal (2008) report. The published data include summary inequality measures and decile shares, as well as income
poverty rates, for a number of time points over the last 30 years at about 5-year intervals, the most recent being
around 2005.

For the European Union, both micro-data and summary indicators of poverty and inequality have been pro-
duced by Eurostat since 1994, and the country coverage of these data has expanded along with membership of
the Union itself. The key sources are the European Community Household Panel Survey organised by Eurostat
and carried out in most of the then (15) EU member states from the mid-1990s to 2001, and subsequently the EU-
Statistics on Income and Living Conditions data-gathering framework which replaced it and extend to the new
9 The following countries covered by GINI are missing: Bulgaria, Japan, Latvia and Lithuania,

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