This note describes how poverty measures reported by the World Bank can be replicated using the Stata command povcalnet. Users can estimate poverty at any poverty line for the world, regions or sets of countries, by directly querying the World Bank's database of household surveys. The command...

This paper finds that capital and labor incomes in the United States have become more closely associated since the 1980s. This contributed to the well-known increase in the top 1 percent's share of total income, exacerbating rising inequality in capital incomes and earnings. The paper shows that...

Using a new database of household surveys, this paper examines inequality among all individuals living in developing East Asia regardless of their country of residence. The East Asian Gini index increased from 39.0 in 1988 to 43.3 in 2012. Inequality increased during the initial decade,...

More than a decade of energy and transport subsidies have weakened Argentina’s fiscal capacity. Following the 2001 crisis, public services tariffs were frozen in an attempt to offset the negative effects on households’ real purchasing power. However, these subsidies steadily increased over...

In the 2000s, global inequality fell for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, driven by a decline in the dispersion of average incomes across countries. Between 1988 and 2008, a period of rapidly increasing global integration, income growth was largest for the global top 1 percent and...

Household income surveys often fail to capture top incomes which leads to an underestimation of income inequality. A popular solution is to combine the household survey with data from income tax records, which has been found to result in significant upward corrections of inequality estimates....

This paper uses a set of national household surveys to study the regional Sub-Saharan Africa distribution of consumption expenditure among individuals during 1993 to 2008. The analysis puts the disparities in living standards that exist among persons in Africa into context with the disparities...

In 2013, the World Bank adopted two goals: First, reduce global extreme poverty to 3 percent by 2030. Second, promote shared prosperity defined as the income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population within a country. This paper simulates the global poverty headcount under three growth...

Income differences arise from many sources. While some kinds of inequality, caused by effort differences, might be associated with faster economic growth, other kinds, arising from unequal opportunities for investment, might be detrimental to economic progress. This study uses two new metadata...