3 Assessing inequality using labour income

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the implications for inequality of recent ILO estimates of the labour income share and distribution. Using household surveys for 95 countries, mainly from the ILO Harmonized Microdata collection, we estimate the labour income of the self‐employed to produce an internationally comparable labour income share dataset. Furthermore, we use the same methodology to obtain the first‐ever estimates of the labour income distribution. The labour income distribution estimates complement the two main data sources used until now to study inequality: expenditure distribution and total income distribution. Crucially, labour income distribution data have a reasonable coverage for all country income groups, unlike other data sources that are characterized by undercoverage for either lower‐income countries (regarding data on total income) or higher‐income countries (regarding data on expenditure).The estimates show that the global labour income share declined substantially between 2004 and 2017. In high‐income countries, the decline in the labour share is driven largely by decreases in the average labour income of the self‐employed. This is consistent with a scenario in which new forms of work erode the earning power of the self‐employed. Focusing on income inequality, the use of the labour income distribution as a proxy for the total income distribution is found to be a more reliable proxy than the commonly used expenditure distribution data. Moreover, the estimates suggest that the use of expenditure as a proxy of income have led earlier studies to underestimate total income inequality severely in less developed countries. Hence, global income inequality is likely to be much higher than previously assumed.