Publication: Global Income Distribution : From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession
Date
2013-12
ISSN
Published
2013-12
Author(s)
Abstract
The paper presents a newly compiled and
improved database of national household surveys between 1988
and 2008. In 2008, the global Gini index is around 70.5
percent having declined by approximately 2 Gini points over
this twenty year period. When it is adjusted for the likely
under-reporting of top incomes in surveys by using the gap
between national accounts consumption and survey means in
combination with a Pareto-type imputation of the upper tail,
the estimate is a much higher global Gini of almost 76
percent. With such an adjustment the downward trend in the
Gini almost disappears. Tracking the evolution of individual
country-deciles shows the underlying elements that drive the
changes in the global distribution: China has graduated from
the bottom ranks, modifying the overall shape of the global
income distribution in the process and creating an important
global "median" class that has transformed a
twin-peaked 1988 global distribution into an almost
single-peaked one now. The "winners" were
country-deciles that in 1988 were around the median of the
global income distribution, 90 percent of whom in terms of
population are from Asia. The "losers" were the
country-deciles that in 1988 were around the 85th percentile
of the global income distribution, almost 90 percent of whom
in terms of population are from mature economies.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Lakner, Christoph; Milanovic, Branko. 2013. Global Income Distribution : From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 6719. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/16935 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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