Gini Coefficients for Subsidy Distribution in Agriculture

This note seeks to quantify inequality in the distribution of 2000 and 2001 agricultural subsidies for France, Great Britain, the European Union and the United States using gini coefficients and associated Lorenz curves. Because the subsidy data are available only in aggregate form, a parametric extrapolation technique for grouped data is employed. For comparative purposes, the results are compared with similar measures for the distribution of income in Brazil, identified as one of the world’s most unequal countries in the 2004 World Bank World Development Report. The results, which are Lorenz consistent, show that the dispersion of subsidies in the selected countries and the European Union is far more skewed than the dispersion of income in Brazil. The note will describe the dataset and methodology, then present the results and the conclusions about relative inequality that can be drawn from them. The Appendix gives the original datasets and preliminary calculations used to generate the inequality measures.