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Branko Milanovic

2 Mar, 10 tweets, 2 min read

What are the countries about whose income distributions we know the least, i.e. those that either do not conduct income surveys, or do not release them, or do not participate in harmonized data bases by the World Bank, Luxembourg Income Survey, Economic Research Forum etc?

The *worst* (not surprisingly) are Saudi Arabia and North Korea. No surveys ever, no data.

Somalia & Somaliland probably never had a survey either. Eritrea might have had, but nothing is available.
Almost equally bad are Qatar and Oman; and UAE (they at least had 1 survey).

Then, there are difficult cases:
W Sahara is probably included in Moroccan surveys.
Abkhazia, South Ossetia do not have surveys. The same (as far as I know) is true for Macao (but not for Hong Kong which had surveys for 40y), Nauru.
N Cyprus is not included in Cypriot data.

There are also issues of colonies which field surveys but since they are not sovereign states, these surveys are never included in international data bases (Bermuda, Martinique, New Caledonia, Falklands, Aruba etc). You have to chase them individually.

Then come countries with no income surveys available in the past twenty years:

Trinidad and Tobago, last survey 1993
Guyana, Turkmenistan 1998
Surinam 1999
Micronesia 2000

And finally somewhat less delinquent countries:
Uzbekistan 2003
Azerbaijan 2005
Venezuela 2007
Central African Rep. 2008
Syria and Libya fall into that category too.

A good news is that Sub-Saharan Africa is now quite well covered by surveys. Almost all countries have more or less regular surveys; they are not done every year, but the average gap of 2-4 years is quite acceptable.

Another good news is that some countries that have international recognition problems are very keen to be forthcoming with the data. I would single out two: Taiwan and Palestine.

As is obvious from this, lots of problems with data are political.
Areas in turmoil (like today's Libya or Syria) cannot collect data; other govts (like S Arabia) do not want to know the facts, or want to hide them.
Some hide them (Algeria) without really knowing why they do it.

Here are the key databases:
Povcal (World Bank)
iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/povO…
LIS (micro data available)
lisdatacenter.org/our-data/lis-d…
ERF (micro data)
erfdataportal.com/index.php/cata…

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More from @BrankoMilan

Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

2 Mar

A final point on politics of surveys.
In the past, the usual dissemination was to publish detailed tables with many permutations. Some countries used to publish thick booklets, e.g. British Blue Books, or French Enquetes de menages...

...or similar detailed data from Yugoslavia (APD, all republics), Poland (Badanie...), Hungary, Czechoslovakia.
Some countries (Japan, Taiwan) still publish several hundred pages-long books w/ tables for each survey.
US does it too.

However, such publications are dying out.
People are moving to electronic data.
But this is not all good.
In some cases, yes, the access to micro data (see LIS) has expanded tremendously.

Read 5 tweets

Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

27 Feb

If I had my own way, I would never pay much attention (today) to people who would tell me they want to study inequality & populism, and inequality & discrimination. These are popular topics, everybody is now ready to study them & I would take it as a sign of lack of originality.

But, leaving aside global inequality and links between factoral and personal inequality, which are indeed my favorite topics, I would love on see studies on (here are some examples):

Why the end of apartheid did not bring income inequality down (but increased it) in South Africa?

Will climate change (under current projections) increase inter-country inequality or not?

Read 9 tweets

Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

26 Feb

Expanding on Bukharin.
Bukharin is often credited with a quip that the Soviet Union has a two-party system too, one party is in power, another in jail.
I thought you could try to apply his quip to the current multi-party systems in many post-communist countries.

One could argue that in many there are only three parties:
-party of nationalists,
-party of pensioners, and
-party of the mafia.
The reason is that these are the three constituencies that really exist. The party system thus reflects well the body-politic.

Any kind of the left has ceased to exist. When you do not have the left, you do not have the right either, partly because the ideology of the right is shared by all relevant factions in society: disdain for workers & trade unions, celebration of wealth.

Read 6 tweets

Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

25 Feb

My four worst experiences (+ there are two others but they are too complicated to describe on Twitter).
#EconTwitter

1 A very famous economist who, after having an email fight with me, writes to the Chief World Bank economist, strongly evoking their personal relationship, to ask that I should be dismissed (I saw the letter). He failed (easily).

2 An even more famous right-wing economist, at a meeting, after we each introduced ourselves, gives me barely a glance and turns himself toward the head of the table & says seriously and sternly, "you pay here people to study inequality and undermine the system?"

Read 5 tweets

Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

18 Feb

If you wanted to bring everybody in the world to the level of the Western median income, total world income would need to be multiplied by 2.5. And you would need to reduce incomes of all those who currently make more than the Western median (~10% of global population).

Obviously, one-half of Western population would have to have their incomes cut; those with the Western mean income by some 15%.

If you were to do the same calculation in current exchange rates, the numbers are even bleaker.

The take home message is:
the idea that somehow we can all live at the Western median income and the entire GDP of the world need not increase much is...well, a pure fantasy.

Read 4 tweets

Branko Milanovic

@BrankoMilan

10 Feb

I read this article, recommended as showing how "decent living" can be achieved by much lower energy use. After calculating an arbitrary goods/services basket which the authors call "decent living"
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

(an exercise that many economists have done for ages for poverty lines) the authors show that "decent living" (in its more economical version) can be achieved by energy consumption equal to Rwanda's and more generously with that equal to Uruguay's.
Let's accept that.

@jasonhickel

How are people who are currently consuming multiple times the energy of Rwanda (=most of the rich world) to be convinced to reduce their use so much?
@jasonhickel says it cannot be done by taxes and subsidies & green decoupling.
Let's accept that too.

Read 5 tweets

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