| 21 January, Friday (9:00am-10:30am) Session 4A: Regional Integration and Spillovers |
Disentangling the Effect of Regional Integration on Income Inequality
Author/s: Clarisa Flaminiano, Mara Tayag, Lovely Ann Tolin, Rolando Avendano
While the Gini coefficient is a common measure for income inequality, its limited country coverage poses challenges for empirical analysis. In the context of ADB's Asia-Pacific Regional Cooperation and Integration Index (ARCII), this could lead to biased estimates especially for small and underdeveloped countries where data on the Gini index is usually unavailable. This paper aims to address this by using alternative measures such as the Palma ratio, the Atkinson index, or the index developed by Ali and Son (2007) to assess the impact of regional integration on income inequality. Based on a sample for 156 countries, preliminary estimates suggest that regional integration.
JEL codes: C38, D63, F15