Welfare Inequality in Spain: A Three-Dimensional Approach

This paper provides the first multidimensional analysis of welfare inequality in Spain by constructing a synthetic micro-dataset that jointly observes household income, consumption and net wealth for the same households. The results show that Spain’s three welfare dimensions overlap imperfectly and display different inequality profiles: consumption is least unequal, income is intermediate, and wealth is by far the most concentrated. Three-dimensional analysis reveals that deprivation concentrates across dimensions far more than affluence does, a finding with direct implications for the social policy. A weighted composite welfare index yields a Gini coefficient of 0.336, below the income but above the consumption Gini, suggesting that income alone modestly overstates welfare inequality in Spain. Overall, the findings show that a multidimensional approach substantially changes both the estimated level of welfare inequality and the ranking of households across the distribution.