Practice question · True or false
The Gini coefficient for market income, before taxes and transfers, is substantially higher than the Gini for disposable income in most European countries.
Hints
- Ask what taxes and transfers are for.
- The difference between the two figures is the redistributive system in one number.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, and the gap is large, market-income Gini coefficients close to 0.5 are common in the EU against disposable-income figures around 0.3. Quoting one without the other makes redistribution invisible, which is why cross-country comparisons of "inequality" need to say which distribution they measured.
Practise Inequality, Poverty and Social Exclusion
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Sociology I is free to start.
More questions on Inequality, Poverty and Social Exclusion
- Spain’s median income fell between 2008 and 2013 and its relative poverty rate rose only modestly, even…
- Complete the account of how the European Union measures poverty.
- Rowntree distinguished primary from secondary poverty in his classic York study. Why does this distinction…
- Sort each description by whether it is a case of absolute or of relative poverty.
- A country’s median equivalised disposable income is 25,000 euros. What is its at-risk-of-poverty threshold in…
- Arrange the steps of constructing an at-risk-of-poverty rate, in order.
- Estimate the percentage of Spain’s population at risk of poverty or social exclusion in recent years, on the…
- Because there will always be a bottom to any income distribution, the relative poverty rate cannot be reduced.
- Sen argued that what matters is what a person is able to do and to be, rather than the income they hold. How…