So we've seen the types of cakes that have been cooked over five-year periods for the last 35 years. In this post we look at the second part of our framework to analyse political projects: how the cake is shared. Statmu provides us with a wealth of data to do this. The simplest information is the share of the cake going to the bottom and top 20% households. For example this what happened since 1986/7 (the sexy charts will be for later).
Income share in % 1986/7 1991/2 1996/7 2001/2 2006/7 2012
Bottom 20% 5.6 6.4 5.9 6.2 6.1 5.4
Top 20% 44.2 43.5 46.2 44.8 45.6 47.5
Ratio 7.9 6.8 7.8 7.2 7.5 8.8
Clearly this puts the lie to the assertion used by TINAwallahs that there is little we can do about inequality and that it is a phenomenon which is entirely tied to globalisation. As the data shows although it has been increasing -- let's focus on the ratio for now -- since 2001/2 there are also two interesting periods where it actually fell. One is in 1991/2 which coincided with the passing of the baton of Finance Minister between Lutchmeenaraidoo and Sithanen. So the former actually decreased inequality by putting an extra 0.8% of GDP in the hands of the bottom 20% and this was mostly financed by reducing the share of the top 20%. Enter Sithanen and he reverses most of the gains of the bottom 20% while giving the top 20% an extra eye-popping 2.7% -- that's more than three times what the bottom 20% got in the preceding 5 years. This ensured that the top 20% got their biggest share since 1986/7.
And then five years later Bheenick and Bunwaree clawed back three-fifths of the loss the bottom 20% experienced and reduced the share of the top 20% by 1.4% or half of what they gained during the first stint of Dr. TINAnen. We obviously have more to say on this interesting dataset. We'll do this in our next posts.
Income share in % 1986/7 1991/2 1996/7 2001/2 2006/7 2012
Bottom 20% 5.6 6.4 5.9 6.2 6.1 5.4
Top 20% 44.2 43.5 46.2 44.8 45.6 47.5
Ratio 7.9 6.8 7.8 7.2 7.5 8.8
Clearly this puts the lie to the assertion used by TINAwallahs that there is little we can do about inequality and that it is a phenomenon which is entirely tied to globalisation. As the data shows although it has been increasing -- let's focus on the ratio for now -- since 2001/2 there are also two interesting periods where it actually fell. One is in 1991/2 which coincided with the passing of the baton of Finance Minister between Lutchmeenaraidoo and Sithanen. So the former actually decreased inequality by putting an extra 0.8% of GDP in the hands of the bottom 20% and this was mostly financed by reducing the share of the top 20%. Enter Sithanen and he reverses most of the gains of the bottom 20% while giving the top 20% an extra eye-popping 2.7% -- that's more than three times what the bottom 20% got in the preceding 5 years. This ensured that the top 20% got their biggest share since 1986/7.
And then five years later Bheenick and Bunwaree clawed back three-fifths of the loss the bottom 20% experienced and reduced the share of the top 20% by 1.4% or half of what they gained during the first stint of Dr. TINAnen. We obviously have more to say on this interesting dataset. We'll do this in our next posts.
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