International Comparability of Statistics on Income Distribution.

This paper reviews the current state of income distribution statistics and comes to the conclusion that poor quality data and unresolved conceptual and technical problems, in a context of structural differences among countries, did not permit valid cross-national comparisons at the time. The problem was not only quality of data but also purpose of data—“income” is a variable concept and “income data” collected for one purpose, such as taxation, may not be suitable for another purpose, for example distributional analysis in relation to social justice or family levels of living.