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.
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://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/16935 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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