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Using Personal Car Register for Measuring Economic Inequality in Countries with a Large Share of Shadow Economy: Evidence for L atvia
Author(s) -
Siliverstovs Boriss,
Kholodilin Konstantin A.,
Dombrovsky Vyacheslav
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
review of income and wealth
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.024
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1475-4991
pISSN - 0034-6586
DOI - 10.1111/roiw.12011
Subject(s) - shadow (psychology) , inequality , economics , value (mathematics) , estimation , register (sociolinguistics) , personal income , economy , demographic economics , labour economics , macroeconomics , statistics , psychology , mathematical analysis , linguistics , philosophy , mathematics , management , psychotherapist
We suggest using information from the state register of personal cars as an alternative indicator of economic inequality in countries with a large share of shadow economy. We illustrate our approach using the L atvian pool of personal cars. Our main finding is that the extent of household economic inequality in L atvia is much larger than officially assumed. According to E urostat, the officially published estimate of the G ini coefficient for L atvia is 0.374 for 2009, which is much higher than the G ini coefficient value reported for all the 27 EU member countries (0.304), but significantly lower than 0.48 according to our results.