Distributional national accounts for the Netherlands and a comparison with 12 other countries

Abstract

Most inequality studies rely on micro data that do not capture a substantial share of income identified in the national accounts. In the Netherlands, almost one fifth of household disposable income is missed by current inequality statistics. In this paper, we present inequality statistics for the Netherlands that capture all of household income, so‐called distributional national accounts. Compared to the current inequality statistics, the Gini coefficient for disposable income increases substantially from 0.289 to 0.337. Cross‐country comparisons show that such a change between Gini coefficients based on micro‐data versus Gini coefficients based on distributional national accounts does not apply to all countries. The difference between both Gini coefficients varies not only between countries in the size, but also in the sign of the difference.