U.S. Participation in the Development of a Transnational Database

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The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) database project consists of comparable cross-sectional microdata on the composition of households and the structure of their incomes for 25 industrialized economies as of January 2001. It has also added labor force survey data for 16 nations under another subtitle, the Luxembourg Employment Study (LES). LIS is one of the (if not the) leading examples of an interdisciplinary, cross-national, cooperative data infrastructure which supports research that leads to important policy relevant insights. The plans for the next three years include several improvements in database management (more sophisticated electronic access system; better on-line documentation; fifth wave of data for 2000; new surveys of the labor force); in research (inequality, poverty, gender studies); in training (annual LIS workshops in the United States, in Europe and elsewhere); in continuing to set new international standards for income distribution statistics; and in developing purchasing power parities for income distribution studies; and in providing US users with more direct access to the other nations' LIS surveys.Over the past 17 years, the LIS project has demonstrated its feasibility and usefulness as an internationally sponsored and researcher-lead database infrastructure project. The vast majority of its support, and all of its "core" operations, are funded by an international consortium of 16 nations and 22 funders such as the U.S. National Science Foundation. Because electronic access to LIS is, by design and intent, free once a privacy pledge is signed, users treat it as a "public good" which provides benefits at little or no direct cost to them. Hence, "core" funding is always a crucial issue. And so this proposal for core funding from the United States, like the proposals to the other 15 nations, is vital to the continued future of the LIS project.