Hi All
Please join us for a joint webinar session of the Africa and Inequality Working Groups
Our upcoming webinar will be on Top Incomes in Ivory Coast.
The event is organized by IWG members Giacomo Gabbuti and Marc Morgan-Milá.
Please join us on Thursday December 8th (12PM EST/17PM GMT/ 18PM CET) by clicking on this link: https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/389118765
Speaker Bios and Abstracts
Léo Czajka: 'Combining Fiscal and Survey Data to Measure Inequality in a Developing Country: The Case of the Ivory Coast in 2014'
Léo Czajka is a recent masters graduate of the Paris School of Economics (PSE). He is currently a research assistant for the World Wealth and Income Database (wid.world) project at PSE, working on income inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Abstract Until very recently, data on income distribution in Sub-Saharan Africa has been mainly used to estimate poverty rates. Yet, the rapid growth experienced by several countries in the last two decades suggests looking beyond the bottom of the income distribution. All existing studies on income concentration in Sub-Saharan Africa rely solely on survey data, but due to under declaration or under sampling biases, such instruments often fail to accurately measure the income of the wealthiest individuals. Furthermore little is known about the size of such biases as it requires to have access to more reliable sources of information, which are particularly scarce across the continent. In this presentation, we will first describe what we know about inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa and why it would deserve to be further studied. Then we will confront survey data with first-hand income tax files in the case of Ivory Coast in 2014 and illustrate how they can diverge. Finally we will correct survey data using the information provided by the tax files. Our results show that the 2014-2015 survey underestimated the Gini coefficient by about 4-5 points, and the top 1 per cent share by at least 6 percentage points.
See you there!