Income Inequality and Inequality of Opportunity in Europe: Are they on the Rise?

The aim of this chapter is to shed some light on the behavior of Income Inequality and Inequality of Opportunity over time for 26 European countries. The analysis is carried out using microdata collected by the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), which incorporates a wide variety of personal harmonized variables, allowing comparability between countries. The availability of this database for years 2004 and 2010 is particularly relevant to assess changes over time in the main inequality indices and the contribution of circumstances to inequality of opportunity. Furthermore, a bootstrap estimation is performed with the aim of testing whether the differences between both years are statistically significant.