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Using Personal Car Register for Measuring Economic Inequality in Countries with a Large Share of Shadow Economy: Evidence for Latvia

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  • Boriss Siliverstovs
  • Konstantin A. Kholodilin
  • Vyacheslav Dombrovsky

Abstract

type="main"> We suggest using information from the state register of personal cars as an alternative indicator of economic inequality in countries with a large share of shadow economy. We illustrate our approach using the Latvian pool of personal cars. Our main finding is that the extent of household economic inequality in Latvia is much larger than officially assumed. According to Eurostat, the officially published estimate of the Gini coefficient for Latvia is 0.374 for 2009, which is much higher than the Gini coefficient value reported for all the 27 EU member countries (0.304), but significantly lower than 0.48 according to our results.

Suggested Citation

  • Boriss Siliverstovs & Konstantin A. Kholodilin & Vyacheslav Dombrovsky, 2014. "Using Personal Car Register for Measuring Economic Inequality in Countries with a Large Share of Shadow Economy: Evidence for Latvia," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 60(4), pages 948-966, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:revinw:v:60:y:2014:i:4:p:948-966
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    Cited by:

    1. Braguinsky, Serguey & Mityakov, Sergey, 2015. "Foreign corporations and the culture of transparency: Evidence from Russian administrative data," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 117(1), pages 139-164.
    2. Michał Brzeziński & Katarzyna Sałach & Marcin Wroński, 2020. "Wealth inequality in Central and Eastern Europe: Evidence from household survey and rich lists’ data combined," Economics of Transition and Institutional Change, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 28(4), pages 637-660, October.
    3. Michal Brzezinski & Katarzyna Sałach & Marcin Wroński, 2019. "Wealth inequality in Central and Eastern Europe: evidence from joined household survey and rich lists’ data," Working Papers 2019-09, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw.

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • E26 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Informal Economy; Underground Economy
    • Z13 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification

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