Wealth Inequality in Turkey: What Can We Infer from the SILC?

Using micro data from the Survey of Income and Living Conditions conducted by TurkStat, we apply the capitalization method to determine the extent of wealth inequality in Turkey. This method involves the estimation of household wealth based on the amounts of income resulting from the ownership of various types of assets. In addition to the calculation of wealth inequality, capitalized incomes can be entered into a decomposition analysis to find out which factors contribute to inequality more than the others. Due to data limitations, we are restricted to an analysis that makes use of financial and rental income figures and imputed rents, while wealth in the form of land, gold, or stock ownership is mainly unaccounted for. The Gini coefficient figure of 0.56 implies that wealth inequality measured at the household level for Turkey is not extremely high. However, additional computations suggest that inequality is quite higher at the individual level.