Inequality results
As indicated, this week I begin with reporting the key results of official studies that sought to measure inequality and poverty in Guyana. As also previously indicated the 2006 Household Income and Expenditure Survey (HIES) still remains the most recent available official study of these topics. In my last column I had joined others (including the Inter-American Development Bank, (IDB)) in lamenting this depressing condition of the country’s social statistics. Parenthetically, I should also inform readers that the 2006 HIES was not explicitly designed as a poverty study; however, such types of large-scale spending and household surveys have been used several times before in other countries for this purpose, when direct poverty and inequality surveys were not available.
As I also noted previously, the most widely used measure of income/consumption inequality worldwide is the Gini Coefficient. Readers should therefore know that this coefficient is given on a scale of 0 to 1, where 0 represents perfect equality; that is, a situation where everyone in the measured statistical population obtains the same income, welfare, or value of income/consumption. When the value of the Gini Coefficient is one (1) the scale indicates a situation where one person gets all the income, welfare, or value of consumption and the others get none.
The 2006 HIES used household consumption as the proxy measure for income and welfare. That survey revealed a Gini Coefficient of 0.35 for all Guyana. This value compares to 0.44 obtained from the