John Cassidy of The New Yorker pulls together six charts on income inequality and social mobility in the US in this post.
The third chart offers some international comparisons with reference made to Ireland’s high level of market income inequality and the impact the tax and transfer system has on disposable income inequality.
Alan Taylor sends me to this post: the chart is definitely one for the classroom.
The CSO release is here.
This week the OECD released an update of their income inequality statistics which was covered in an article by Dan O’Brien in yesterday’s Irish Times. For household disposable income Ireland is not unusually unequal.
Under both measures Ireland is less unequal than the OECD average. Data is for 2010 except for 2009 data from Hungary, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand and Turkey, and 2011 data from Chile.
The OECD dataset also includes a gini-coefficient for direct income (i.e. household income prior to taxes and transfers). Direct income includes employee earnings, employer social insurance contributions, self-employed earnings and other direct income. There is no data for Hungary, Mexico or Turkey. The following chart has the most recent figures (mainly 2010) for this gini coefficient (most equal first).
For the 31 countries shown, Ireland has the highest level of inequality for direct income, and by some distance. The (2009) Irish figure is 0.591 compared to an arithmetic average for the sample of 0.470.
Charts showing the impact each country’s tax and transfer system has on the gini coefficient and the resulting gini coefficients for household disposable income are below the fold.
Those of you interested in long run trends in income inequality in Ireland might like to take a look at this piece from the magazine “Significance”. It uses the difference between incomes of the top 10% less the incomes of the top 1% as its summary measure for inequality. It takes a pure time series approach and suggests that for the last 40 years or so there is a 12 year cycle in inequality with a very slight upward trend.
Warning: As John McHale might put it, it is “wonkish”!
http://www.significancemagazine.org/details/webexclusive/4386781/Income-inequality-in-Ireland-from-1922-to-2009.html