- OECD
- Contributors
- France
About Carlotta Balestra
Carlotta Balestra is a Policy Analyst at the OECD working on advancing how societies define and improve well-being. She has contributed to the work behind the OECD Better Life Initiative — including the Better Life Index and the report How’s Life? Measuring Well-Being — and she currently coordinates a number of analytical and statistical projects on the measurement of well-being inequalities. In 2015, she conceptualised and contributed to the development of the OECD Compare Your Income web-tool, which allows to assess people’s perceptions of income inequality. Carlotta has published in peer-reviewed academic journals and contributed chapters in collected volumes, such as the Handbook of Research on Economic and Social Well-being.
Influencer Of
Recent Comments
Congratulations. This is a superb tool and an example of top class communication. Every politician in an OECD country should look at this - and the Better Life Index - regularly. As Tomas Pikkety has shown, income distribution developments are a clear and present danger to capitalist and mixed societies. Some remarks:
- Elements of the cute design regularly cover text or figures. You may want to test the site on a Mac with Safari.
- I am interested in the stats for more than the top three social spending categories chosen to enhance with extra tax receipts. BTW, since money is fungible, new tax receipts do not necessarily have to be spent on social goals to achieve income re-distribution. How about e.g. lowering sales tax, which would have a net income equalising effect?
- I understand OECD can go only so far with its conclusions. Why not make the code publicly available for those who want to go further (like e.g. Wikipedia)?
Thank you very much for your positive feedback, Peter! Compare your income (CYI), along with the Better Life Index, is part of a broad OECD endeavour to make our statistics as accessible as possible to a larger audience all while preserving their robustness.
Before its launch, we tested CYI on different systems (iOS, Android) and many display sizes to ensure that it worked properly under different configurations. We were not able to test all configurations, so we apologise for the inconvenience you experienced. We will inform our web-developer so they may explore this issue further.
I agree with you that redistribution through income tax and social transfers is only one possible way to keep inequality in check. Future editions of the web-tool could indeed dig further into people's views on who bears responsibility for reducing income differences and on which instruments should be used.
Once sufficient data has been collected, our objective is to prepare analysis on people’s preferences and priorities to help policymakers as they develop their recovery strategies. We also plan to make anonymised users’ responses available to the research community.