Is global inequality getting better or worse? A critique of the World Bank's convergence narrative (original) (raw)
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World Income Inequality in the Global Era
Several studies have recently found that world income inequality declined during the closing years of the twentieth century. However, these studies feature a number of shortcomings, including the use of outdated national income estimates to measure inequality between countries, as well as sparse data to capture the smaller (but growing) component found within countries. The current study addresses these concerns and offers new estimates of world income inequality based on 151 countries covering 95 percent of the world's population during the 1990–2008 period. Overall, the results are fairly compatible with prior efforts, lending greater confidence to earlier findings. Nevertheless, the results suggest that prior studies covering the 1990s overestimate the decline in between-country inequality, but underestimate the rise in within-country inequality. Consequently, total inequality did not begin to decline substantially until the post-2000 era. After presenting these estimates, I then examine factors associated with income mobility among the 15,100 subnational percentile groups in my data set. The results suggest that (a) the negative effect of inequality is larger than the positive effect of economic growth among the poorest 25 percent of the world's population, and (b) late industrialization has contributed to income convergence between countries, while economic globalization has primarily served to stretch income distributions within nations.
2004
In recent years, an ample literature has emerged on the evolution of global inequality during the last two decades. A few stylized facts emerge. If one weights countries by their population, then inequality across countries has declined. However, if one treats countries equally – as in the macroeconomic convergence (divergence) literature—then there has been increasing inequality. Which view is the correct one? In this paper, we use the 2004 version of the World Bank’s World Development Indicators to re-examine the evidence over the 1980-2002 period, and the data reaffirm the two trends described above. Even if inequality declined by most common aggregate inequality indices, there is neither full Lorenz dominance of 2002 over 1980 in population-weighted terms, nor first-order dominance. The aggregate inequality indices also mask the tremendous mobility of countries, and in particular, the impoverishment of about two dozen countries at the bottom of the distribution over the period i...