Get OECD income inequality data

Downloads (and caches) the Gini coefficient of disposable income for OECD member countries from the OECD Income Distribution Database (IDD).

Usage

get_oecd_inequality(countries = "all", start_year = 1990, refresh = FALSE)

Arguments

countries

Character vector of ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country codes, or "all" for all available OECD members. Defaults to "all". Run list_oecd_countries() to see available codes.

start_year

Numeric. Earliest year to include. Defaults to 1990.

refresh

Logical. If TRUE, re-download even if a cached copy exists. Defaults to FALSE.

Value

A data frame with columns:

country

ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code (character)

country_name

English country name (character)

year

Calendar year (integer)

series

"GINI" (character)

value

Gini coefficient of disposable income (numeric)

unit

"Gini coefficient (0-1)" (character)

Details

The Gini coefficient measures income inequality on a scale from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (maximum inequality). Disposable income is household income after taxes and transfers. The series follows the OECD METH2012 methodology where available for consistency across countries and time.

See also

Other social indicators: get_oecd_education(), get_oecd_health()

Examples

# \donttest{
op <- options(readoecd.cache_dir = tempdir())
gini <- try(get_oecd_inequality(c("AUS", "GBR", "USA", "DNK"), start_year = 2000))
#> Downloading from OECD API...
if (!inherits(gini, "try-error")) head(gini)
#>    country country_name year series  value                   unit
#> 40     AUS    Australia 2012   GINI 0.3260 Gini coefficient (0-1)
#> 41     AUS    Australia 2014   GINI 0.3370 Gini coefficient (0-1)
#> 42     AUS    Australia 2016   GINI 0.3300 Gini coefficient (0-1)
#> 43     AUS    Australia 2018   GINI 0.3250 Gini coefficient (0-1)
#> 39     AUS    Australia 2020   GINI 0.3190 Gini coefficient (0-1)
#> 2      DNK      Denmark 2011   GINI 0.2505 Gini coefficient (0-1)
options(op)
# }