Failure to publish Gini figure hides Swazi level of inequality

According to reports out last week, Beijing's statisticians have failed to publish a figure for China's Gini co-efficient for the 11th year running.

If you are not familiar with it, the Gini co-efficient is considered the standard measure of income inequality. The formula for calculating it is truly frightening, with lots of brackets, Greek and Roman letters, both big and small, and a generous helping of superscripts and subscripts.

Happily, however, the concept behind it is simple enough. The Gini co-efficient measures a country's inequality of income on a scale of zero to 100. A score of zero would represent perfect equality, with everyone in the economy earning the same amount. In contrast, a score of 100 would see all the income generated by the entire country going to a single individual, while everyone else got nothing.

On this measure, the most equal countries in the world are usually reckoned to be Japan, which is famously uniform, and the egalitarian social democracies of Scandinavia. According to the World Bank, all get scores of around 25.

In contrast, the most unequal countries are to be found in Southern Africa. South Africa itself gets among the highest scores of all at 65. In general, any score above 40 is regarded as getting into territory where inequality is a problem.

The last time Beijing's statisticians published an official Gini co-efficient was in 2000, when they gave China a score of 41. Since then, they have kept quiet, saying only that they do not have sufficiently accurate data on different income groups to calculate a number. The inference many have drawn is that China's income distribution has now grown so unequal that the publication of a reliable Gini number would come as a severe embarrassment for the government.