OECD 19개 주요국가의 소득불평등 패널 시계열분석 = Widening Income inequality and its determinants in 19 OECD countries: A Panel Cointegration Approach

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Increasing income inequality in OECD developed countries have recently sparked great deal of political and economic debate. While many theories and empirical works have been proposed to explain this increase, there has been very little panel econometric analysis. By employing panel unit root and cointegration test, and DOLS estimations, this paper examines the long-run relationship between top 1% income shares and a number of explanatory variables for a panel of 19 OECD developed countries over the period from 1980 to 2008. The econometric methodology first uses panel unit root tests to ascertain the order of integration in the variables in order to ensure that cointegration econometrics is appropriate. By employing the Westerlund’s (2007) error correction panel method the existence of cointegration is then tested. Finally, DOLS(Dynamic OLS) were utilized to estimate the respective parameters. Our empirical result shows that such as economic globalization and technological progress are found to have significantly negative effects on income inequality, which support the SBTC hypothesis and income distribution theory of trade economics, while trade union density, tax revenue per GDP are important neutralizer of worsening income inequality in both groups of countries. Regulations in most cases was found to have no significant effect on top 1% income share. By sequentially omitting each country and estimating coefficients and their t-statistics of DOLS regression in the remaining sample, we are able to confirm that the estimated coefficients are relatively stable and always significant at the 1~5% level, suggesting that our results are not due to potential outliers. The main contribution of this paper is that it is the first attempt to apply panel cointegration technique to examine the long-run relationship between income inequality and other explanatory variables such as globalization, technological progress, regulation, union membership rate, and tax revenue per GDP.