No subject

J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. rosserjb at jmu.edu
Thu Aug 17 12:48:25 PDT 2000


Folks,

Have been having an offlist discussion with Doug about his list of Gini coefficients. I also have a lot of such numbers from the same source and some of them do not agree with what he has posted. Mostly they are in the ballpark, and as Ginis are notoriously hard to estimate, and Branko is dealing with a lot of revisions, I would not have fussed.

But at least two are way off. I suspect that somebody typing these numbers in for Doug hit a wrong key. They are Austria and Georgia. There is no way that Austria has gone from 22.8 to 47.2 between 1988 and 1993. I suspect the second number should be 27.2. Also, Milanovic's 1998 book, _Income, Inequality, and Poverty during the Transition from Planned to Market Economies_ (World Bank, 1998, Washington) gives a number for Georgia in 1993 of 56.0. Doug's list shows it going from 25.3 to 24.3. No way.

There are other numbers on his list that do not agree with ones that appear in Milanovic's published work. But most are not off by too much. Generally the list is about right in terms of where countries stack up against each other and their trends during that period. Barkley Rosser



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list