Abstract:

The successes of social and economic policy are expressed, first of all, in a more uniform growth of the well-being of all citizens of the country. However, there is a diversity of approaches to measuring inequality across countries. The lower values of the Gini coefficient calculated by consumption can create a wrong picture of the public welfare in the country compared to other countries in which inequality is estimated by income or by other means. The purpose of the paper is to point out the problem of discrepancies in measuring income inequality in countries that previously had planned economies and construct estimates of money income inequality including forecast estimates on the example of Kazakhstan.  The procedure for forecasting the inequality is based on the approximation of the Lorentz curve by a lognormal distribution. Forecasting inequality allows assessing the effectiveness of the economic policy being developed in the country.  It is known that one of the drawbacks of estimating inequality through the Gini index is the complexity of accounting for the income of high-income groups of the population. The methodology used in the article makes it possible based on macroeconomic indicators to make an estimate of these incomes and for more accurately assess the inequality in the distribution of incomes. Estimating of income inequality will provide an opportunity to get a real idea of the state of the economic stratification of a country's population in comparison with other countries. Moreover, forecasting inequality indicators will create the basis for effective management of income inequality reduction processes in the country.