Measuring the Evolution of Inequality in the Global Economy

This paper provides a summary of information in the UTIP data set on the evolution of industrial earnings inequality in the global economy. At present the data set covers 66 countries, with annual observations going back to 1972 in most cases and to 1963 in many. Our measure of changing inequality, based on the group-wise decomposition of the Theil statistic across industrial categories, appears to be a sensitive barometer of political and economic conditions in many countries, and the percentage change in this index appears to be meaningfully comparable across countries. We also measure and detect regional patterns of similarity in the movement of inequality through time