Marcin Wroński

Collegium of World Economy,

Warsaw School of Economics

Warsaw, Poland 

Email: mwronsk@sgh.waw.pl

Multidimensional inequality in the European Union. The joint distribution of household income, wealth and consumption

Abstract. We use a novel cross-country data set to measure multidimensional inequality of income, wealth, and consumption in 21 EU countries. We investigate the correlation between the positions of the household in their distributions. We use the bootstrap method to assess the statistical significance of cross-country differences. We find that the correlation between the position of the household in considered distributions varies significantly across countries. Homeownership, median income, and level of unidimensional inequalities are correlated with the strength of the link between distributions. Multidimensional analysis of inequality changes the picture emerging from the unidimensional inequality analysis. Wealth inequality is a crucial contributor to multidimensional inequality. Cross-country differences in multidimensional inequality in the European Union are rather mild.

Received: December, 2020

1st Revision: April, 2021

Accepted: August, 2021

DOI: 10.14254/2071-789X.2021/14-3/11

JEL Classification: D31, D63

Keywords: income distribution, wealth distribution, consumption distribution, multidimensional inequality, European Union