Abstract
High-income inequality, accompanied by substantial regional differentiation, is still a great challenge for social policymakers in many European countries. One of the important elements of this phenomenon is the inequality between income distributions of men and women. Using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, the distributions of income for Italy and Poland were compared, and the gender gap in these countries was assessed. No single metric can capture the full range of experiences, so a set of selected tools were adopted. The Dagum model was fitted to each distribution, summary measures, like the Gini and Zenga inequality indices, were evaluated, and the Zenga curve was employed to detect changes at each income quantile. Afterward, empirical distributions were compared through a relative approach, providing an analytic picture of the gender gap for both countries. The analysis moved beyond the typical focus on average or median earnings differences, towards a focus on how the full distribution of women’s earnings relative to men’s compares. The analysis was performed in the different macroregions of the two countries, with a discussion of the results. The study revealed that income inequality in Poland and Italy varies across gender and regions. In Italy, the highest inequality was observed in the poorest region, i.e. the islands. On the contrary, in Poland, the highest inequality occurred in the richest region, the central one. The relative distribution method was a powerful tool for studying the gender gap.
Highlights
Income disparity is still growing in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries and it reached its highest level in the past half-century
A relatively strong negative correlation was observed between gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and income inequality measured by the Gini index in the Italian regions, while in Poland this correlation was slightly positive
The European Union (EU)-SILC is an instrument aiming at collecting timely and comparable cross-sectional and longitudinal multidimensional microdata on income, poverty, social exclusion and living conditions. This instrument is anchored in the European Statistical System (ESS)
Summary
Income disparity is still growing in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries and it reached its highest level in the past half-century. Several studies were conducted on the issue (e.g., OECD 2011, 2015). For social and economic policies, it seems interesting to compare income inequality across the European Union (EU) countries and regions. The focus of the present paper is on income distributions across Poland and Italy because the aforementioned countries represent different economic backgrounds. Poland still suffers the effects of the transitioning from a centrally-planned economy to a market-based economy, and Italy is a former well-established market economy. According to the Tarki European Social Report (TA RKI, 2009), a study on intolerance to income inequality across countries confirmed a markedly lower level of acceptance of inequality in the post-socialist bloc than in the other European countries
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