Focusing on the welfare of the less well off as a measure of real societal progress is the fundamental principle underlying the WBG indicator of"shared prosperity", namely income growth of the bottom 40 percent in every country. This paper uses a database assembled by the World Bank Group to...

Measured by the Gini coefficient, income inequality in Brazil rose from 0.57 in 1981 to 0.63 in 1989, before falling back to 0.56 in 2004. This latest figure would lower Brazil's world inequality rank from 2nd (in 1989) to 10th (in 2004). Poverty incidence also followed an inverted U-curve over...

Is a pro-growth strategy always the best pro-poor strategy? To address this issue, the author provides an empirical evaluation of the impact of a series of pro-growth policies on inequality and headcount poverty. He relies on a large macroeconomic data set and estimate dynamic panel models that...

Comparing changes in inequality with initial levels, using new data, the author finds that within-country inequality in income or per capita consumption is converging toward medium levels--a Gini index around 40 percent. The finding is robust to allow for serially independent measurement error...

Using three rounds of the Ghana Living Standard Survey, conducted between 1988 and 1992, the authors present findings that shed light on the structure of inequality among different socioeconomic groups in different geographic areas, in the context of poverty reduction. First, poverty reduction...

Drawing on a compilation of data from household surveys representing 130 countries, many over a period of 25 years, this paper reviews the evidence on levels and recent trends in global poverty and income inequality. It documents the negative correlations between both poverty and inequality...

This paper examines support for reducing inequality and for income redistribution to specific groups in Europe and Central Asia. The paper uses the Life in Transition Survey to analyze cross-country differences in redistributive preferences and the determinants of individual-level differences in...

Thepaper studies regional (spatial) inequality in the five most populous countries in the world: China, India, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil in the period 1980-2000. They are all federations or quasi-federations composed of entities with substantial economic autonomy. Two types of...

While the Azerbaijan household income and expenditure survey (HIES) data satisfy most empirical regularities expected in a typical household survey data, the inequality measures based on the data are unusually low. For example, for the latest three years for which we have data (2002 - 2004), the...

Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes and life expectancies as unequal as they are today? For want of sufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequality for 14 ancient, pre-industrial societies using...