Davies et al. (2008, 2011) provided the first estimates of the global distribution of wealth, using 2000 as the benchmark year. These estimates have been revised and updated since 2010, and the purpose of this paper is to explain the ways in which the estimation methodology has evolved and...

This paper is the first to compare global trends in income and wealth inequality this century. It is based on large income and wealth microdata samples designed to be representative of all countries in the world. Measured by the Gini coefficient, inequality between countries accounts for about...

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,...

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...

This paper reviews the theory and application of decomposition techniques in the context of spatial inequality. It establishes some new theoretical results with potentially wide applicability, and examines empirical evidence drawn from a large number of countries.

This paper applies a new decomposition technique to the study of variations in poverty across the regions of Russia. The procedure, which is based on the Shapley value in cooperative game theory, allows the deviation in regional poverty levels from the all- Russia average to be attributed to...

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...

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,...

When incorporating differences in household characteristics, the choice of equivalence scale can affect the ranking of income distributions. An alternative approach was pioneered by A.B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon (G.R. Feiwel (Ed.), Arrow and the Foundation of the Theory of Economic Policy,...

We provide a characterization of the generalised satisfaction - in our terminology nondeprivation - quasi-ordering introduced by S.R. Chakravarty (Keio Economic Studies 34 (1997), 17-32) for making welfare comparisons based on the absence of deprivation. We show that the non-deprivation...