Recovering within-country inequality from trade data

Tell me what you import, and I tell you your Gini index!

Joint with G. Vannoorenberghe.
Journal of the European Economic Association, 2026.

Abstract

This paper develops a novel method to estimate inequality within a country based on what it imports. If preferences are non-homothetic, rich and poor individuals in a country have different consumption profiles. Observing imports can thus inform us about the income distribution in a country. The global availability of trade data allows us to estimate inequality using the same transparent and comparable method for a large sample of countries over time. Compared to conventional data, we feature an especially good coverage of developing countries. We provide a number of robustness checks and cross-validation exercises to gauge the performance of our method.