There has been much recent research on the world distribution of income, but also growing recognition of the importance of other contributions to well-being, including those of household wealth. Wealth is important in providing security and opportunity, particularly in poorer countries that lack...

We provide the first estimate of the level and distribution of global household wealth. Mean assets and debts within countries are measured, partly or wholly, for 38 countries using household balance sheet and survey data centred on the year 2000. Determinants of mean financial assets,...

This paper establishes the principles which should govern the welfare and inequality analysis of heterogeneous income distributions. Two basic criteria?the ?equity preference? condition and the ?compensation principle??are shown to be fundamentally incompatible. The paper favours the latter,...

We describe a new method of facilitating inequality and poverty analysis of grouped distributional data by allowing individual income observations to be reconstructed from any feasible grouping pattern. In contrast to earlier methods, our procedure ensures that the characteristics of the...