The Global Consumption and Income Project (GCIP): An Introduction and Preliminary Findings

We introduce the Global Consumption and Income Project (GCIP), which is developing two separate datasets (The Global Consumption Dataset (GCD) and The Global Income Dataset (GID)) containing an unprecedented portrait of consumption and income of persons over time, within and across countries, around the world. The benchmark version of the dataset presents estimates of monthly real consumption and income of every decile of the population (a ‘consumption/income profile’) for the vast majority of countries in the world (more than 130) for every year for more than half a century (1960-2012). We describe here its construction and provide an initial set of descriptive findings in order to showcase the possibilities for its use.