Essays on Economic Policy (ESPE in Spanish) - Statistical Inference for Testing Gini Coefficients: An Application for Colombia
En la revista Ensayos sobre Política Económica (ESPE) divulgamos los resultados y las propuestas de política que surgen de investigaciones académicas realizadas en el Banco de la República. Cuando nos lea, tenga siempre presente que el contenido de nuestros artículos, así como los análisis y conclusiones que de ellos se derivan, son exclusiva responsabilidad de sus autores. El material divulgado en nuestra revista ESPE no compromete ni representa la opinión del Banco de la República ni la de su Junta Directiva.
This paper uses Colombian household survey data collected over the 1984-2005 period to estimate Gini coefficients and their corresponding standard errors. We find a statistically significant increase in wage income inequality following the adoption of the liberalization measures during the early 1990s, and mixed evidence from the recovery years that followed the economic recession during the late 1990s. We also find that in several cases the observed differences in the Gini coefficients across cities have not been statistically significant.
