Page 123 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 1

IPS102 Peter V. et al.

Inclusive growth: Does economic growth benefit
all?
Peter van de Ven, Jorrit Zwijnenburg
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

Abstract
Government policy is very much driven by economic growth. Almost
unconditionally, hardly giving any consideration to which population groups
capture the gains from the additional income generated, growth of GDP is
considered as the primary policy target. However, especially in developed
economies, trends in recent decades, possibly reinforced by globalisation and
digitalisation, have shown declining shares of compensation of employees,
increasing inequalities in income and wealth, and median incomes hardly
improving. Not only the resulting political tensions, but also the growing focus
on trying to capture (material) well-being, have led to an increased policy
attention for arriving at inclusive growth, i.e. economic growth that benefits
the whole population and not only a happy few.
As a consequence of the above, user demands for data which link
distributional information to macro¬economic statistics has increased
tremendously. A problem in this respect is that data on the micro-level which
describe income, consumption and wealth at the level of households and
individuals, show, sometime quite significant, inconsistencies with data for
similar indicators at the macro-level as can be derived from the system of
national accounts. This hampers policy analysis and related advice.
This paper describes the work that has been done in the context of the OECD-
Eurostat Expert Group on Disparities within National Accounts (EG DNA). The
main objective of this group is to arrive at a consistent set of data on the
distribution of income, consumption, saving and wealth, by bridging the gaps
between the micro- and the macro-data. An additional objective is to develop
methodologies for estimating more recent distributional information by
combining more recent macro-data with the less timely micro-data. The paper
will focus on the methodologies applied, the initial results, and the main
problems encountered.

Keywords
Distribution of Income and Consumption; GDP; Household Disposable
Income; National Accounts

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