Advanced industrial democracies experience increasing inequalities or at least a new trade-off between equality and growth: liberal welfare states opted for growth and accepted rising inequality, while conservative welfare states tried to hold back inequality, thereby accepting lower growth, and...

Most methods for the analysis of distributional change rely on the changes in the income of a particular group of people, taking either the situation of this group in the previous period, or the average change in the population, as reference point. By contrast, we propose a measure of...

Defining the ‘global middle class’ as being neither poor nor rich in the developed world, we estimate the size of the global middle class in China and 33 other countries and analyze China’s expanding middle class in international perspective. China’s global middle class has grown rapidly...

Economic change over the past twenty years has rendered many individuals and territories vulnerable, leading to greater interpersonal and interterritorial inequality. This rising inequality is seen as a root cause of populism. Yet, there is no comparative evidence as to whether this discontent...

Combining consensus forecasts of growth of population and real incomes during 2014-35 with household income surveys for more than a hundred countries accounting for the bulk of the world economy, we project the income distribution in 2035 across all individuals in the world. We find that the...

This study examines empirically the impact of income polarization on economic growth in an unbalanced panel of more than 70 countries during the 1960-2005 period. We calculate various polarization indices using existing micro-level datasets, as well as datasets reconstructed from grouped data on...

Incomes in the poorest two quintiles on average increase at the same rate as overall average incomes. This is because, in a global dataset spanning 118 countries over the past four decades, changes in the share of income of the poorest quintiles are generally small and uncorrelated with changes...

We introduce two separate datasets (The Global Consumption Dataset (GCD) and The Global Income Dataset (GID)) making possible an unprecedented portrait of consumption and income of persons over time, within and across countries, around the world. The current benchmark version of the dataset...

This paper uses data from the key comparative sources available for the rich countries to examine how both real median incomes and income inequality have evolved from around 1980 through the Great Recession. There are striking differences across OECD countries in average real median income...