Household asset inequality in Turkey : how informative is the survey of income and living conditions ?

Abstract EN

Using micro data from the Survey of Income and Living Conditions conducted by TurkStat, we apply the capitalization method in an attempt to determine the extent of wealth inequality in Turkey.

This well-established method involves the estimation of household wealth based on the amounts of income resulting from the ownership of various types of assets.

In addition to the calculation of wealth inequality, capitalized incomes are entered into a decomposition analysis to find out which factors contribute to inequality more than the others.

Due to data limitations, we are restricted to an analysis that makes use of financial and rental income figures and imputed rents, while wealth in the form of land, gold, or stock ownership is mainly unaccounted for.

The Gini coefficient figure of 0.54 implies that wealth inequality measured at the household level for Turkey is not extremely high.

However, additional computations suggest that inequality is quite higher at the individual level