The nature of global and regional income distributions and the extent of inequality are examined using country-level data on income distributions drawn from World Bank studies and the World Institute for Development Economics Research for the period 1993 - 2000. Beta-2 income distributions are...

A major problem encountered in studies of income inequality at regional and global levels is the estimation of income distributions from data that are in a summary form. In this paper we estimate national and regional income distributions within a general framework that relaxes the assumption of...

Various inequality and social welfare measures often depend heavily on the choice of a distribution of income. Picking a distribution that best fits the data in some sense involves throwing away information and does not allow for the fact that, by chance, a wrong choice can be made. It also does...

The Lorenz curve relates the cumulative proportion of income to the cumulative proportion of population. When a particular functional form of the Lorenz curve is specified it is typically estimated by linear or nonlinear least squares, estimation techniques that have good properties when the...