The Standardized World Income Inequality Database*

Abstract

Objective Since 2008, the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID) has provided income inequality data that seek to maximize comparability while providing the broadest possible coverage of countries and years. This article describes the current SWIID's construction, highlighting differences from its original version, and reevaluates the SWIID's utility to cross‐national income inequality research in light of recently available alternatives. Methods Coverage of inequality data sets is assessed across country‐years; comparability is evaluated in terms of success in predicting the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), recognized in the field as the gold standard in comparability, before those data are released. Results The SWIID offers coverage double that of the next largest income inequality data set, and its record of comparability is three to eight times better than those of alternate data sets. Conclusions As its coverage and comparability far exceed those of the alternatives, the SWIID remains better suited for broadly cross‐national research on income inequality than other available sources.

Determinants of governmental redistribution: Income distribution, development levels, and the role of perceptions

“…Rather, the adjustments utilized in the SWIID vary over time and space as much as possible given the underlying data. A precise description of the multiple imputation procedure and a detailed documentation of the number of countries for which adjustments vary can be found in Solt (2016Solt ( , 2015.…”

“…In version 5.0 it covers 174 countries from 1960 to 2013 with estimates of net income inequality comparable to those obtained from the LIS Key Figures for 4,631 country-years, and estimates of market income inequality for 4,629 country-years. The standardization process of the SWIID is described in Solt (2016).…”

“…These are the "World Income Inequality Database" (WIID) provided by UNU-WIDER (2014) and the "Standardized World Income Inequality Database" (SWIID) compiled by Solt (2009Solt ( , 2016). An intense discussion has arisen on whether to use the WIID or the SWIID for cross-country analyses on inequality.…”

The Paradox of Well-being: Do Unfavorable Socioeconomic and Sociocultural Contexts Deepen or Dampen Radical Left and Right Voting Among the Less Well-Off?

“…Socioeconomic inequality is measured by the Gini coefficient. We used data from the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID; Solt, 2014). To measure the size of the welfare state, we look at social welfare expenditure (in percentage of GDP).…”

Global trends in relative and absolute income inequality

“…6 Consequently, tax data are often used to measure the highest incomes (Atkinson et al, 2011) and to adjust the overall income distribution data accordingly (Lakner and Milanovic, 2013;Solt, 2014). However, recent evidence shows that the very rich often successfully evade taxes (Palan et al, 2010;Henry, 2012;Zucman, 2015) 7 , which casts doubt on the reliability of these tax-adjusted data.…”