An International Comparison of the Incomes of the Vast Majority (original) (raw)

The Vast Majority Income (VMI): A New Measure of Global Inequality

2008

GDP per capita (GDPpc) is by far the most popular measure of international levels of development. It is fairly well understood and widely available across countries and time. 1 But it is also recognized that GDPpc is an imperfect proxy for important factors such as health, education, and well-being.

WP 2007-3 An International Comparison of the Incomes of the Vast Majority

2007

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large. ... Paper provided by Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA), The New School in its series SCEPA Working Papers with number 2007-3. ... F. Clementi & M. Gallegati & G. Kaniadakis, 2006. "k-Generalized Statistics in Personal Income Distribution," Quantitative Finance Papers physics/0607293, ...

The World Distribution of Income And Its Inequality, 1970-2009

Review of Income and Wealth, 2013

This paper provides a full decomposition of world inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, in the period 1970-2009. In particular, using the Analysis of Gini (ANOGI), the paper describes the evolution of between inequality, within inequality, and the impact of overlapping on both factors. While there is evidence that between inequality in the last decade significantly declined due to the rapid Chinese growth, within inequality and overlapping went in the opposite direction. Furthermore, with the exception of some Asian countries, the rest of the world has not moved significantly. As a result, world inequality remains high by any standard.

On the capacity of the Gini index to represent income distributions

Metron-International Journal of Statistics, 2020

Almost all governmental and international agencies use the Gini index to summarize income inequality in a nation or the world. The index has been criticized because it can have the same value for two different distributions. It will be seen that other commonly used summary measures of inequality are subject to the same criticism. The Gini index has the advantage that it is able to distinguish between two distributions that have identical integer valued generalized entropy measures. Because no single measure can fully summarize a distribution, researchers should consider combining the Gini index with another measure appropriate for the topic being studied. Keywords Generalized entropy measures • Gini index • Lorenz curve • Measures of income inequality • Pareto distribution • Moment problem

CHAPTER 11 The Global Distribution of Income

2014

This chapter investigates recent advances in our understanding of the global distribution of income, and produces the first estimates of global inequality that take into account data on the incomes of the top one percent within countries. We discuss conceptual and methodological issues – including alternative definitions of the global distribution, the use of household surveys and national accounts data, the use of purchasing power parity exchange rates, and the incorporation of recently available data on top incomes from income tax records. We also review recent attempts to estimate the global distribution of income. Our own estimates combine household survey data with top income data, and we analyze various aspects of this distribution, including its withinand between-country components, and changes in relative versus absolute global inequality. Finally, we examine global poverty, which is identified through the lower end of the global distribution. 937 Handbook of Income Distribu...

Global Income Inequality A review

2006

Global inequality is a relatively recent topic. It was not until the early 1980s that the first calculations of inequality across world citizens were done. 1 This is because in order to calculate global inequality, one needs to have data on (within-) national income distributions for most of the countries in the world, or at least for most of the populous and rich countries. But it is only from the early-to mid-1980s that such data became available for China, 2 the Soviet Union and its constituent republics and large parts of Africa. Before we move to an analysis of global inequality, however, it is useful to set the stage by delineating what topics we shall be concerned with and what not. This is necessary precisely because of the relative underdevelopment of the topic, reflected in the fact that the same or similar terms are often used in the literature to mean different things. We need to distinguish between inequality among countries' mean incomes (inter-country inequality or Concept 1 inequality as dubbed by Milanovic, 2005), inequality among countries' mean incomes weighted by countries' populations (Concept 2 inequality), and inequality between world individuals (global or Concept 3 inequality). Concept 1 inequality deals with convergence and divergence of countries' incomes, and although at first this line of work was couched in inequality terms (see Baumol, 1986), most of the later work used cross

Global Income Inequality in Numbers: in History and Now

Global Policy, 2013

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.