This paper discusses the rationale as well as the challenges involved when constructing gender-related indicators of well-being. It argues that such indicators are critically important but that their construction involves a number of conceptual and measurement problems. Among the conceptual...

Since intra-household resource distribution is unobserved, it is difficult to compare how women and children fare across countries. To address this, we analyze 45 household expenditure surveys from predominantly low- and middle-income countries, i.e. an international sample of around 2.4 million...

This paper focuses on the importance data issues to the analysis of growth, poverty and economic inequality. We introduce a number of major databases frequently used in applied research on growth, poverty and global and international inequality. A discussion of data quality, data consistency,...

This review covers a range of measures and methods frequently employed in empirical analysis of global income inequality and global income distribution. Different determinant factors along with quantification of their impacts and empirical results from different case studies are presented. These...

Income inequality can be measured at different levels of aggregation such as global, continental, international and national levels. Here we consider income inequality at regions defined as equivalent of continental and sub-continental levels. We investigate the economic disparity between...

In many countries extreme poverty is unnecessary. Yet it persists. We propose a simple index, denoted the Miser index, to measure the extent to which societies have poverty in the midst of affluence. It builds on the generalized Lorenz curve, but can also be seen as a measure of polarization...

In the age of globalization, the question whether inequality in the world rose or fell down, is a hot topic. Leading scholars in the field of economic inequality measurement developed methods to estimate empirically the distribution of welfare (income) amongst world citizens. Despite their...

We compare absolute, relative and intermediate views on the evolution of global inequality between 1980 and 2009. According to the relative view, inequality remains invariant after a uniform proportional change of all incomes whereas the absolute view requires invariance to a uniform change of...

This working paper: (i) provides an overview of global, regional and national income inequalities based on the latest distribution data from the World Bank, UNU-WIDER and Eurostat; (ii) discusses the negative implications of rising income inequality for development; (iii) calls for placing...

In this paper we investigate the evolution of the inequality in well-being across different countries between 1975 and 2000. We treat well-being as a multidimensional concept focusing on three important dimensions of life: standard of living, health and education. Inequality in the three...