The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) is an international social science consortium currently participated in by 14 industrialized nations which have agreed to pool microdata on the incomes of families living within their divergent economies. The data so furnished are made statistically comparable and stored at a central facility in Luxembourg, where they may be accessed by researchers either on-site or remotely through a computerized telecommunications network. The LIS database provides a rich resource for multifaceted analyses of income distributions, of systems of cash and noncash income transfers, of relative levels of economic well-being across different demographic groupings, and of many other topics which are now, or soon will be, of worldwide societal concern. Support for the data facility is provided by consortium member nations on a shared-cost basis. Funds provided by the National Science Foundation constitute United States participation in the consortium, and these funds help assure that the potential value of the LIS database to U.S. social scientists will be realized. The full cooperation of all member nations is required in order to guarantee feasibility of data retrieval, maintenance of high standards of data quality, and gradual relaxation of methodological constraints on certain types of data analysis. National Science Foundation funds not only represent U.S. cooperation in the enterprise, they also assure U.S. involvement in all important developmental decisions as well as helping to offset the costs of database mantenance and update.
