Top Incomes and the Measurement of Inequality in Egypt
Vladimir Hlasny and
Paolo Verme
No 874, Working Papers from Economic Research Forum
Abstract:
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, people’s awareness of income inequality has increased across the globe and this is sometimes at odds with income inequality measured with household surveys. This paradox is the most evident in Egypt, a country that experienced a revolution in 2011 partly motivated by calls for social justice and where income inequality measured by household surveys was low and declining during the decade that led to the revolution. A possible culprit of this anomaly is the poor measurement of top incomes. This paper exploits unprecedented access to household data and a combination of newly developed statistical methods designed to correct for top incomes biases to re-evaluate income inequality in Egypt. The paper finds a consistent and significant underestimation of the Gini inequality measure due to unit non-responses. The degree of underestimation is estimated at around 1.3 percentage points (confidence interval 1-2 percentage points), a finding robust to the different top incomes correction approaches proposed and to the use of income or expenditure measures. The Egyptian data follow rather closely the Pareto distribution and inequality corrected for top incomes biases remains low by regional and world standards.
Pages: 30
Date: 2014-11, Revised 2014-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)
Published by The Economic Research Forum (ERF)
Downloads: (external link)
http://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/874.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/874.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/874.pdf)
http://bit.ly/2lvukpX (text/html)
Related works:
Journal Article: Top Incomes and the Measurement of Inequality in Egypt (2018) ![Downloads](/downloads_econpapers.gif)
Working Paper: Top incomes and the measurement of inequality in Egypt (2013) ![Downloads](/downloads_econpapers.gif)
Working Paper: Top incomes and the measurement of inequality in Egypt (2013) ![Downloads](/downloads_econpapers.gif)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erg:wpaper:874
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Papers from Economic Research Forum Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Namees Nabeel (nnabil@erf.org.eg).