Estimating Income Poverty and Inequality from the Gallup World Poll

Abstract

This article takes advantage of a new source of information, the 2006 Gallup World Poll, to estimate and characterize income poverty and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) at the country level, and to compare LAC with other regions in the world. The Gallup survey has the advantage of being conducted in over 130 nations with almost the same questionnaire; it stands as a complement to national household surveys for international comparison purposes. Our results confirm that Latin American countries are among the most unequal in the world, but we also find, considered as a single unit, Latin America is less unequal than other regions.

Access to and Use of Bank Services in Nigeria: Micro-Econometric Evidence

“…The survey contains up to 1000 individual respondents (within the ages 15 and older), randomly selected with countrywide representation. The GWP survey has gained coverage as it has been used by some other studies such as Gasparini and Gluzmann (2009) who studied income, poverty and inequality for Latin America and the Caribbean countries. Also Deaton (2007) earlier studied the linkage between income, ageing, health and well-being around the world using the GWP survey.…”

Does Income Class Affect Life Satisfaction? New Evidence from Cross-Country Microdata

“…Schneider (2016) presents a good comprehensive overview of this literature. Gasparini and Gluzmann (2012), Graham and Nikolova (2015) and Nikolova (2016) provide a rich discussion on the advantages and caveats of subjective wellbeing measurement and its link with income and income inequalities. In the next subsection, we briefly discuss additional theories and mechanisms linking subjective wellbeing to income and income inequality.…”

“…Some drawbacks and limitations raised concerning the use of this question as a measure of subjective wellbeing include the caveat that respondents might interpret this question differently and, rather than capturing their absolute wellbeing, they might still answer it from a relative-deprivation perspective (i.e., respondents give their answer a positioning meaning with respect to others) (Gasparini and Gluzmann (2012)). However, this type of measure has a significant advantage over other subjective measures of wellbeing as it reflects the person's capabilities, means and long-term opportunities.…”

Output and analysis of subjective well‑being measures

“…For example, Smith (2013) estimated that income non-response rates ranged from under 5% to just over 35% for countries involved in the 2008 European Values Survey, with a similar variation in the World Values Survey. Gasparini and Gluzmann (2009) found non-response rates in the 2006 Gallup World Poll among Latin American and Caribbean countries to range from 2% (in Ecuador) to 39% (in Trinidad and Tobago). The potentially non-random nature of income non-responses (Riphahn and Serfling, 2005;Gasparini and Gluzmann, 2009;Zweimüller, 1992) and the various techniques deployed to manage them (which range from dropping all observations from the analysis, to imputation methods) can potentially impact on estimated coefficients.…”

“…Gasparini and Gluzmann (2009) found non-response rates in the 2006 Gallup World Poll among Latin American and Caribbean countries to range from 2% (in Ecuador) to 39% (in Trinidad and Tobago). The potentially non-random nature of income non-responses (Riphahn and Serfling, 2005;Gasparini and Gluzmann, 2009;Zweimüller, 1992) and the various techniques deployed to manage them (which range from dropping all observations from the analysis, to imputation methods) can potentially impact on estimated coefficients. Further research and reporting on this phenomenon is needed.…”