Measuring Income Inequality Across Countries and Over Time: The Standardized World Income Inequality Database

By F. Solt. Social Science Quarterly, 2019

882 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Objective: This article documents wide-ranging revisions to the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID), which seeks to maximize the comparability of income inequality estimates for the broadest possible coverage of countries and years. Methods: Two k-fold cross-validations, by observation and by country, are used to evaluate the SWIID's success in predicting the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), recognized in the field as setting the standard for comparability. Results: The cross-validations indicate that the new SWIID's estimates and their uncertainty are even more accurate than previous versions, extending its advantage in comparability over alternate income inequality datasets. Conclusion: Given its superior coverage and comparability, the SWIID remains the optimum source of data for broadly cross-national research on income inequality.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/256e87a27e81a12b33d8f47f4c2ac12d5b5db876

Citations in the corpus

• The trouble with trust: Time-series analysis of social capital, income inequality, and COVID-19 deaths in 84 countries (2020, neutral): “The SWIID contains harmonised estimates of post-taxation, posttransfer income inequality (Gini index) in 2018 based on data from United Nations University’s World Income Inequality Database and Luxembourg Income Study (Solt, 2020).”
• Socio-economic conditions for satisfying human needs at low energy use: An international analysis of social provisioning (2021, neutral): “2 (SWIID; Solt, 2020).”
• Financial Development, Technological Innovation and Income Inequality: Time Series Evidence from Turkey (2021, neutral): “We take gini index from SWIID (Solt 2019), the other series are gathered from the World Bank (2020) database.”