Foto: Raitis Plauks, F64
Shrilling arguments on budget debate
During the 2011 budget debate some arguments in the press were so silly that I couldn?t bother to address them but they did deserve comments for being so dumb and here is perhaps a context in which to do so. I think it is well-known that income distribution in Latvia is far from equal but is it well-known that it is the least equal in all of the EU? Below is the Gini coefficient, a commonly used concept of inequality, for EU27.
For those not so familiar with the Gini coefficient this is a way to interpret it: It indicates the percentage of total income that would have to be redistributed in order to achieve total income equality. For Latvia this is around 37%, in Slovenia, the most equal EU country, it is just some 23%. In some countries it can reach values as high as 70-80% (Sierra Leone is the worst example I think I have seen: A very, very poor country where a few kleptocrats amass almost all income and wealth, leaving a huge majority of the population dirt poor).
