The Real Inequality Ranking: Where the Economic Gap Hurts Most
Income inequality tells only half the story. What matters is what salaries can buy, who actually pays taxes, who owns the wealth — and whether education still allows the next generation to move up.
We talk about inequality constantly.
We measure it.
We compare countries.
We publish rankings.
And then, almost inevitably, we reduce an extraordinarily complicated economic reality to one number:
the Gini coefficient.
The Gini is useful.
But it is not enough.
A country where the richest 10% earn dramatically more than the poorest 10% can still provide strong public education, affordable healthcare, social mobility and meaningful purchasing power to the middle class.
Another country can have a smaller statistical income gap while housing is unaffordable, taxes fall disproportionately on those who cannot avoid them, university participation is weak and the economic position of children is largely determined by their parents.
Which country is really more unequal?
That is the question I want to answer.
Not ideologically.
Economically.
And to do it, we need to look beyond income.
The problem with measuring inequality
The OECD defines the Gini coefficient on a scale from zero, representing perfect equality, to one, representing maximum inequality.
It normally uses household disposable income after taxes and transfers.
That makes it an extremely useful measure of income distribution.
But it tells us nothing directly about the price of an apartment.
Nothing about the purchasing power of a salary.
Nothing about accumulated wealth.
Nothing about tax evasion.
Nothing about whether a child from a low-income family can graduate from university.
And very little about whether that child will eventually earn substantially more than his or her parents.
That is why I believe inequality should be analysed through several layers rather than one statistic.