Recovering Within-Country Inequality From Trade Data
(2021) , 58 pages
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- Authors
- Abstract
- This paper develops a novel method to estimate inequality within a country based on what it imports. If preferences are non-homothetic, rich and poor individuals in a country have different consumption profiles. Observing imports can thus inform us about the income distribution in a country. The global availability of trade data allows us to estimate inequality using the same transparent and comparable method for a large sample of countries over time. Compared to conventional data, we feature an especially good coverage of developing countries. We provide a number of robustness checks and cross-validation exercises to gauge the performance of our method.
- Affiliations
Citations
Hillrichs, D., & Vannoorenberghe, G. (2021). Recovering Within-Country Inequality From Trade Data (LIDAM Discussion Paper IRES 2021/14). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/109700