Measuring Income Inequality in St. Kitts and Nevis
Measuring Income Inequality in St. Kitts and Nevis
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What is the Gini Index?
The Gini index is one of the most common ways economists measure income inequality. It’s often scored from 0 to 1, where 0 means everyone is earning the same amount of income, while 1 means one person earns it all. Additionally, the closer a country's Gini is to 1, the larger the gap between the rich and the poor.
While looking into the Gini index for our given country, it was found that there has been no recently cited figure since the year of 1993. Websites such as the World Bank and World Inequality Database would technically be good to look at when tracking the requested information, but unfortunately, these websites weren’t able to provide us with this information. As a result, this means there is no official international measure of income inequality for the country. While the Gini scale may not be available, inequality can still be understood if we compare the income shares of the top 10 % and bottom 50% as seen on the WID.
Even though St. Kitts and Nevis does not have a reported Gini coefficient, income inequality can still be understood using income share data from the World Inequality Database, WID. The graph compares the top 10% and the bottom 50% of earners and shows a large gap between them. The top 10% consistently earn nearly half of the country’s total income, while the bottom 50% earn a much smaller share. This wide and persistent gap shows that income is unevenly distributed, even without a Gini score.
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