Global comparisons in income and inequality measures

This table gives some comparative data to illustrate how different countries perform in terms of income development and education. It shouldn’t be any real surprise that both the US and UK rank very highly. However what this type of data does not really reflect is that inequalities also exist within these countries.

Take the UK, if different data are used it is clear that UK has high levels of income inequality compared to other similar countries. We could therefore argue that interpretations regarding social inequalities depend on the measures that we use! This confirms the importance of deciding on which indicator we use. Measuring social inequalities is not easy and you will not be surprised to learn that there are different ways of doing this.

For example, here you can see that we’ve used gross domestic product (GDP), the human development index or expected years of schooling. But there are many other different measures that we could use, such as the poverty line. There isn’t a single correct way to measure any concept and academics debate about the best measures to use.