Monday, October 17, 2011

Some surprises with Gini coefficients

Gini Coefficient rankings of inequality of countries

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html

Not surprisingly, a lot of Scandinavian countries are at the bottom of the list. The highest ranking country? Namibia, which has a lot of mineral wealth, but clearly hasn't distributed it throughout the population. Botswana has a similar story.

As Kristoff reports in the NYTimes, levels of inequality are higher in the US than both Tunisia and Egypt. Notice that the US ranks slightly higher in inequality than Russia, the land of robber barons.

Most interesting to me is that so many former Soviet Bloc countries located on the Iron Curtain have surprisingly low levels of inequality: Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia. Presumably this results from a history of communist redistribution followed by effective democratization. Unlike Russia, these countries did not allow unscrupulous businessman to usurp massive amounts of national assets.

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