Comparing in two dimensions: a broader concept and a novel statistical measure of the time dimension of disparities

Abstract

The increasing integration of EU countries and the introduction of a new round of Applicant countries has created the need for more comparable statistics on indicators and more standardised statistical measures. Hence, indicators such as life expectancy, or GDP per capita have been used for measuring the ‘progress’ of Candidate countries in the Enlargement process, mainly as static measures like Gini coefficients, while the dimension of time is not well developed. In this paper, I argue for a new complementary kind of statistical measure, the S-distance, that would measure the distance (proximity) in time between the points in time when two series are compared that have reached a specified level on indicator X. This can lead to very different analytical and policy conclusions about the interrelationship between growth and inequality. In the empirical section a selected set of economic and social indicators for five candidate and three EU cohesion countries is compared with the EU15 average. It is demonstrated that the degree of disparities across indicators may be very different in static terms and in time. For all eight countries no significant correlation was found between the ordering of indicators by static measure of disparity and by time distance. This confirms that the new broader methodology can provide new insights from existing data and serve also as an excellent analytical and presentation tool for policy debate across many fields of concern.

Keywords:

• time distance
• S-distance
• disparities
• development gap
• cohesion countries
• candidate countries