Regional Income Distribution in the European Union: A Parametric Approach
ISBN: 978-1-78973-378-5, eISBN: 978-1-78973-377-8
Publication date: 16 September 2019
Abstract
This chapter studies trends in income distributions and inequality in the European Union using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions. The author models the income distribution for each country under a Dagum distribution assumption and using maximum likelihood techniques. The author uses parameter estimates to form distributions for regions defined as finite mixtures of the country distributions. Specifically, the author studies the groups of ‘new’ and ‘old’ countries depending on the year they joined the European Union. The author provides formulae and estimates for the regional Gini coefficients and Lorenz curves and their decomposition for all the survey years from 2007 through 2011. The estimates of this study show that the ‘new’ European Union countries have become richer and less unequal over the observed years, while the ‘old’ ones have undergone a slight increase in inequality which is however not significant at conventional levels.
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Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Eurostat for providing the data. Any views expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Eurostat, the European Commission or any of the national authorities whose data have been used. The author would also like to thank Christian Kleiber, Kurt Schmidheiny, the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.
Citation
Spasova, T. (2019), "Regional Income Distribution in the European Union: A Parametric Approach", Decancq, K. and Kerm, P.V. (Ed.) What Drives Inequality? (Research on Economic Inequality, Vol. 27), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1049-258520190000027002
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited