ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the impact of digital service trade on within-country income inequality based on a panel dataset covering 100 countries from 2005 to 2019. We find consistent evidence that digital service trade has a negative effect on income inequality in general. This effect is shown to be statistically significant in high-income and middle-income countries while it is insignificant in low-income countries.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Among them, low-income economies are all countries with per capita gross national income less than $1035 in 2019; low and middle-income (lower-middle income) economies are all countries with per capita gross national income between $1036 and $4045; middle and high-income economies (upper-middle income) are those countries with per capita gross national income between $4046 and $12,535; High-income economies are those countries with per capita gross national income more than $12,536. Source: The World Bank.
2 There are many reasons why the primary completion rate can exceed 100%. The numerator may include late entrants and overage children who have repeated one or more grades of primary education as well as children who entered school early, while the denominator is the number of children at the entrance age for the last grade of primary education.