Global Inequality: Recent Evidence and Trends

This paper examines the nature and extent of global and regional income distribution and inequality using the most recent country level data on income distribution drawn from World Bank and UNU-WIDER studies for the period 1993-2000. The methodology used is a recently developed technique to fit flexible income distributions to limited aggregated data. Empirical results show a very high degree of global inequality, but with some evidence of inequality decreasing between the two years.Gini coefficient, beta-2 distribution

Global inequality: Recent evidence and trends

This paper examines the nature and extent of global and regional income distribution and inequality using the most recent country level data on income distribution drawn from World Bank and UNU-WIDER studies for the period 1993-2000. The methodology used is a recently developed technique to fit flexible income distributions to limited aggregated data. Empirical results show a very high degree of global inequality, but with some evidence of inequality decreasing between the two years

Global income distributions and inequality, 1993 and 2000: incorporating country-level inequality modeled with beta distributions

Using a method-of-moments estimator, flexible three-parameter beta distributions are fitted to aggregate country-level income data to overcome an untenable assumption of previous studies, that persons within each income group receive the same income. Regional and global income distributions are derived as weighted mixtures of country-specific distributions. Analytical expressions for Gini and Theil's measures of inequality at country, regional and global levels are derived in terms of the parameters of the beta distributions. Application to data for 91 countries in 1993 and 2000 reveals a high degree of global inequality, with evidence of declining inequality, largely attributable to growth in China

Global Income Distribution and Inequality: 1993 and 2000

The nature of global and regional income distributions and the extent of inequality are examined using country-level data on income distributions drawn from World Bank studies and the World Institute for Development Economics Research for the period 1993 - 2000. Beta-2 income distributions are fitted to population and income share data for 91 countries. Regional and global income distributions are obtained as population weighted mixtures of the country-specific income distributions. Gini and Theil inequality measures for countries, regions and the world are expressed in terms of the parameters of the beta-2 distributions, and, for regions and the world, decomposed into their within- and between-country components. Empirical results show a high degree of global inequality, but with some evidence of inequality decreasing between the two years, with the decrease being largely attributable to growth in China.beta-2 distribution; mixture distribution; Gini coefficient; Theil index;inequality decomposition.

Replication data for: Global Income Distributions and Inequality, 1993 and 2000: Incorporating Country-Level Inequality Modeled with Beta Distributions

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Research Paper No. 2007/01 Global Inequality Recent Evidence and Trends

This paper examines the nature and extent of global and regional income distribution and inequality using the most recent country level data on income distribution drawn from World Bank and UNU-WIDER studies for the period 1993–2000. The methodology used is a recently developed technique to fit flexible income distributions to limited aggregated data. Empirical results show a very high degree of global inequality, but with some evidence of inequality decreasing between the two years