I suspect that if you took the EU as a whole it probably have a much higher amount of inequality than any one of its constituent states as the differences between these states are currently ignored (and they are pretty big - compare the GDP per capita of Luxembourg ($81,800) and Bulgaria ($12,800)).
Good point. It may seem intuitively true given that the constituent states in the EU are probably as diverse as those in the US.
However, the US had a Gini of 45 [1] while the EU had a Gini of 30 [2], suggesting that despite the vast differences among the European states, overall they are more equal. The reason is that countries like Luxembourg are very small (in population), and Europe as a while is dominated primarily by countries like France, Germany and England where individually income distributions are vastly more equal than in the US.
But within the EU they aren't "states" they are "countries". It would be just as logical to take the Americas together and see how inequality looks when you're spanning from the top end of USA to the bottom end of Columbia.
Stricly speaking that is true - but there is free movement within the EU - someone from one EU member state can live and work in any other member state (with some temporary restrictions for states that have just joined) - so they aren't like other countries. Also member states have already given up a lot of their sovereignty to the EU.
We are continually told that the US is a terribly unequal society - I'm just curious how things would work out if you took something like the EU (higher GDP, much higher population) and compared it to the US.
Note that I am a European, I'm generally pro-EU but I think Europeans generally unfairly criticize the US in this area when we actually live in an increasingly shared society that clearly has its own issues with inequality.
