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13 NEWS maltatoday | SUNDAY • 27 JUNE 2021 Chief Corporate Services Officer (JobsPlus permit 371/2021) Applications together with curriculum vitae and a copy of qualification certificates are to be submitted by 19th July 2021 addressed to: role of each partner – mainly women – in the household. Concurrently, the number of Maltese individuals living in their parental home until their 30s appears to be rising, as are the number of women engaged in part-time or full-time external employment. "One may argue that mul- ti-earner households are at an advantage compared to sin- gle-earner households. Access to higher income brings about greater purchasing power, more consumer choice, economies of scale, and value to leisure time. Perhaps that is why the house- hold employment structure ex- plained almost 31% of income inequality between 2005-2009," the authors said. "However, between 2010 and 2018, this factor lost some of its explanatory power and reached 22% during 2014-2018. Indeed, the data confirms that when ad- justing for household size, the relative income of multi-earner households has been converging to single-earner households. It is hard to say what has caused mul- ti-earner households to have rel- atively less equivalised income than before. However, it indi- cates that participation in the la- bour market on its own may not guarantee financial security." Interestingly, the findings show that market earnings between occupations explains almost 20% of inequality. As expected, the youngest and oldest workers were the groups with the most unequal earnings. "Inequality was mostly attrib- uted to differences in the indi- vidual's qualifications, hours worked, occupations, and house- hold employment structure and size," the authors said, showing that productivity pays more for individual workers. But without state intervention, the imper- fectness of the labour market can result in further inequality. "An important implication for policy is to reduce further bar- riers to economic inclusion as the benefits of growth can easily become battered by its down- sides, especially due to the roles of globalisation, technology and market forces," the authors said. nmeilak@mediatoday.com.mt What is a Gini coefficient? THE Gini coefficient is the most widely-used indicator of inequal- ity, allowing economists to meas- ure the distribution of income or wealth across a country's popula- tion. A country's coefficient will lie somewhere between zero (0%) and one (100%). A zero coefficient means perfect equality, with all income spread equally across a population. A Gini coefficient of 1 translates to complete inequality, whereby one person holds all the income in a given country. This coefficient is often paired with a Lorenz curve, which of- fers a graphical representation of income inequality. A country's Lorenz curve is presented with a straight diagonal line crossing the graph space, representing perfect equality. The space between the country's Lorenz curve and this straight line is the Gini coefficient. In 'numeric' terms, income in Malta was found to be quite evenly distributed. The authors use the 'Gini coeffi- cient' to show this: at 29%, it stood just below the EU average of 30.9%. In simple terms, it is a ranking be- tween 0 and 100%, where zero would represent perfect equality spread across the population. Despite the positive figure, the richest 20% in Malta are receiving 4.3 times more disposable income than the poorest 20%, and that is already a 0.33 marginal increase over 2005 levels. The study makes a distinction between people's gross earnings and equivalised disposable in- come. That's because gross earn- ings are calculated individually, but disposable income can be calculated as the reported income of a given household – usually composed by one or more bread- winners, and several dependents, young and old. In that sense, a large household with one bread- winner is bound to have less cash in hand than a smaller one with two working spouses, for exam- ple. Indeed the study shows that working out the Gini coefficient on gross earnings will 'look better' than working it out on equivalised disposable income. Had there been no social trans- fers and taxes in place, the re- searchers estimate that the Gini coefficient would have increased by 2.6 between 2010 and 2018 through market earnings alone. It was these social transfers that provided a positive redistributive effect between 2014 and 2018. This period saw the introduction of the in-work benefit, tapering of social benefits, and increased efforts to bring more women into the workforce. On the other hand, the study states that taxes contributed to overall inequality in this period, coinciding with the widening of the tax bands for the middle- to upper-income class between 2013 and 2015. 40-60% 60-80% Top 20% 18% 23% 37% Population segments across Malta's population Bottom 20% 20-40% quintile 40-60% quintile quintile Broadcast in 1966, in The Frost Report, 'The Class Sketch' saw John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett compare them- selves to each other socially as upper class, middle class, and lower class