Data Article
- Under a Creative Commons license
- Refers To
Income inequality in the UK: Comparisons with five large Western European countries and the USA
- Applied Geography, Volume 61, July 2015, Pages 24-34
Abstract
This
data article contains information on the distribution of household
incomes in the five most populous European countries as surveyed in
2012, with data released in 2014 and published here aggregated and so
further anonymized in 2015. The underlying source data is the already
anonymized EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EUSILC) Microdata.
The data include the annual household income required in each country
to fall within the best-off 1% in that country, median and mean incomes,
average (mean) incomes of the best off 1%, 0.1% and estimates for the
0.01%, 0.001% and so on for the UK, and of the 90% and worse-off 10%,
the best-off 10% and best-off 1% of households for all countries.
Average
income from the state is also calculated by these income categories and
the number of people working in finance and receiving over €1,000,000 a
year in income is reported from other sources (the European Banking
Authority). Finally income distribution data is provided from the USA
and the rest of Europe in order to allow comparisons to be made. The
data revealed the gross household (simple unweighted) median incomes in
2012 to have been (in order from best-off country by median to
worse-off): France €39,000, Germany: €33,400, UK: €36,300, Italy €33,400
and Spain €27,000. However the medians, once households are weighted to
reflect the nation populations do differ although they are in the same
order: France €36,000, Germany: €33,400, UK: €31,300, Italy €31,000 and
Spain €23,700. Thus weighting to increase representativeness of the
medians reduces each by €3000, €0, €5000, €3300 and €3300 respectively.
In short, the middle (weighted median) French household is €4700 a year
better off than the middle UK family, and that is before housing costs
are considered. This Data in Brief article accompanies Dorling, D.
(2015) Income Inequality in the UK: Comparisons with five large Western
European countries and the USA [1].
Keywords
- Geography;
- Inequality;
- France;
- Germany;
- UK;
- Italy;
- Spain
Specifications table
Subject area Geography, Economics, Sociology, Politics, Health Sciences More specific subject area Income Inequality Measures Type of data Tables How data was acquired Data from anonymised EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EUSILC) and the European Banking Authority Data format Analyzed Experimental factors Income distribution, comparison between EU countries. Experimental features Pretreatment of samples: data weighted by population size and for household charcteristics Data source location Europe, especially the five most populous countries of the EU: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the UK, other affluent countries including Europe and the USA, Canada and Australia – summary statistics on the 1% Data accessibility Data is with this article
Value of the data
- •
- This data allows researchers to quickly examine household income distributions in large European countries without having to go through the formalities of accessing the raw data.
- •
- Estimates are given for each of the five large countries of the number of households nationally living on incomes of many different thresholds so that it is possible to see the incomes of the best-off 1%,then the next best-off 1%, all the way down to the poorest 1%.
- •
- European household incomes have been surveyed in a harmonized manner only relatively recently. Many researchers are unaware that this material is available, or that it reveals median incomes to be so much lower in the UK as compared to Germany and France.
- •
- This data could inspire other works which might consider comparisons after housing costs have been taken into account or which might look in detail at more than five countries.
1. Data
Tables 1 and 2
give detailed breakdowns of gross household incomes in Euros in each of
the five most populous countries of European countries. Please see the
accompanying article [1] for associated tables.
2. Experimental design, materials and methods
The
EU-SILC data was held in a spreadsheet containing 228,692 rows of
information; one row for each household in Europe. Of these some 8058
were in the UK, 13,512 in Germany, 11,360 were in France, 19,399 were in
Italy and 13,109 were in Spain. They were surveyed in 2012 and the data
released to researchers in 2014. The following variables were used:
1. HY010 Gross household income 2. HY020 Post-Tax household income 3. HY022 Post-Benefits household income 4. HY023 Post-Pension household income 5. HY030G Imputed rent gained from owning own property 6. HY040G Real rent gained from being a landlord to others 7. HY050G Child allowance income 8. HY070G Housing allowance income 9. HY080G Income received from alimony and similar sources 10. HY090G Profit – as income from owning shares and similar 11. DB090 Weight – household weight used to sum households.
Simple excel functions such as this were used to calculate the various statistics shown in the tables
=SUMPRODUCT(C220635:C228692,$M220635:$M228692)/SUM($M220635:$M228692)
which
sums the product of each pair of numbers C220635*M220635 down to the
last pair and then divided that very large sum of the contained column
M, which is the household weights. This is simply a weighted average.
To estimate top incomes a new method has to be introduced. First the geometric mean of three ratios was calculated as follows:
=GEOMEAN(C228704/C228705,C228703/C228704,C228702/C228703)
These
are ratios of the worse-off 90% to the best-off 9% (less the top 1%);
the 9% to the 1% (less the 0.1%); and the 1% to the 0.1% (less the 0.01%
who are not in the surveys nor anyone better of than them). In the case
of the UK this geometric mean was 3.2 meaning that each group tended to
be 3.2 times more well-off than the group below it. Those ratios were
assumed to remain constant resulting in a top annual income in the UK of
£104million for the three richest households in 2012.
For
Germany the ratio was 2.7 times and the very highest incomes estimated
were €32.3 million. For France the ratio was 3.1 times and the very
highest income was estimated to be €95.7 million (much less than the UK
total which is in pounds and is nearer €125 million at the then exchange
rates). For Italy the ratio was 2.7 times and the highest incomes were
€34.8 million a year. For Spain the ratio was 1.9 times and the highest
estimated annual incomes were €2.2 million.
Table 3 provides the figures used to calculate these ratios for all countries with the part of that table which became Table 2
in the paper this data brief accompanies highlighted in yellow. This
paper needs to be read alongside the original research paper that first
used the data described here to best understand why data in the form
given here is needed.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Dimitris Ballas for assisting with the data.
Appendix A. Supplementary material
-
- Supplementary material
-
- Supplementary material
References
- [1]
- Income Inequality in the UK: comparisons with five large Western European countries and the USA
- Appl. Geogr., 61 (2015), pp. 24–34
- | |
Copyright © 2015 The Author. Published by Elsevier Inc.
