Abstract
Turkey’s income inequality is one of the highest within the OECD countries. Despite a decline in Gini coefficient in the early years of the millennium, the gains have stalled, and inequality is rising again, resembling changing macroeconomic developments. This paper presents an investigation of income distribution in Turkey using evidence from inequality index decompositions by subgroup and by income source. The evidence suggests a close relationship between education of householder and inequality, while household formation became an important contributing factor in later years. Reliance on paid employment income and social transfers and decline in self-employment and asset incomes suggest an erosion in the incomes of middle classes.
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Notes
- 1.
The figures are taken from OECD database and numbers for Turkey are from TurkStat, Turkish Statistical Institute, based on a different survey as described later in data section of this paper.
- 2.
The shares of subgroups and their relative equivalent incomes are provided in the Appendix.
- 3.
Private transfers are excluded as they are not direct policy tools, although policies may have indirect effect on private transfers.
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Filiztekin, A. (2020). Income Inequality in Turkey: 2003–2015. In: Parlar Dal, E. (eds) Turkey’s Political Economy in the 21st Century. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27632-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27632-4_3
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