Luxembourg Wealth Study Database: Gini Inequality Coefficients, 1993-2020

LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg, (2022). Luxembourg Wealth Study Database: Gini Inequality Coefficients, 1993-2020. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-855655

This project sought to renew the ESRC's invaluable financial support to LIS (formerly the Luxembourg Income Study) for
a period of five more years. LIS is an independent, non-profit cross-national data archive and research institute located in
Luxembourg. LIS relies on financial contributions from national science foundations, other research institutions and
consortia, data-providing agencies, and supranational organisations to support data harmonisation and enable free and
unlimited data access to researchers in the participating countries and to students world-wide. LIS' primary activity is to
make harmonised household microdata available to researchers, thus enabling cross-national, interdisciplinary primary
research into socio-economic outcomes and their determinants. Users of the Luxembourg Income Study Database and
Luxembourg Wealth Study Database come from countries around the globe, including the UK.
LIS has four goals: 1) to harmonise microdatasets from high- and middle-income countries that include data on income,
wealth, employment, and demography; 2) to provide a secure method for researchers to query data that would otherwise
be unavailable due to country-specific privacy restrictions; 3) to create and maintain a remote-execution system that sends
research query results quickly back to users at off-site locations; and 4) to enable, facilitate, promote and conduct crossnational
comparative research on the social and economic wellbeing of populations across countries.
LIS contains the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database, which includes income data, and the Luxembourg Wealth
Study (LWS) Database, which focuses on wealth data. LIS currently includes microdata from 46 countries in Europe, the
Americas, Africa, Asia and Australasia. LIS contains over 250 datasets, organised into eight time "waves," spanning the
years 1968 to 2011. Since 2007, seventeen more countries have been added to LIS, including the BRICS countries (Brazil,
Russia, India, China, South Africa), Japan, South Korea and a number of other Latin American countries. LWS contains 20
wealth datasets from 12 countries, including the UK, and covers the period 1994 to 2007. All told, LIS and LWS datasets
together cover 86% of world GDP and 64% of world population.
Users submit statistical queries to the microdatabases using a Java-based job submission interface or standard email. The
databases are especially valuable for primary research in that they offer access to cross-national data at the micro-level - at
the level of households and persons. Users are economists, sociologists, political scientists, and policy analysts, among
others, and they employ a range of statistical approaches and methods. LIS also provides extensive documentation -
metadata - for both LIS and LWS, concerning technical aspects of the survey data, the harmonisation process, and the
social institutions of income and wealth provision in participating countries.
In the next five years, for which support is sought, LIS will:
- expand LIS, adding Waves IX (2013) and X (2016), and add new middle-income countries;
- develop LWS, adding another wave of datasets to existing countries; acquire new wealth datasets for 14 more countries
in cooperation with the European Central Bank (based on the Household Finance and Consumption Survey);
- create a state-of-the-art metadata search and storage system;
- maintain international standards in data security and data infrastructure systems;
- provide high-quality harmonised household microdata to researchers around the world;
- enable interdisciplinary cross-national social science research covering 45+ countries, including the UK;
- aim to broaden its reach and impact in academic and non-academic circles through focused communications strategies
and collaborations.

Data description (abstract)

This data file includes the Gini coefficient calculated for different wealth welfare aggregates constructed for all Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) datasets in all waves (as of March 2022). It includes Gini coefficients calculated on:
• Disposable Net Worth
• Value of Principal residence
• Financial Assets

Data creators: