This paper presents the global income distribution between all individuals living in the developed world. Global inequality for the group of high-income countries, as measured by the Gini coefficient, stands at 37 in 2013 and has increased by almost 3 Gini points since the mid-1990s. This was...

The interest in the level of global inequality has surged in recent years. This paper complements existing estimates of global inequality by providing the first estimates of the level of bipolarization of the global income distribution. During 1975-2010, global bipolarization declined...

Successful reductions in poverty, resulting from substantial increases in income and structural transformation, have been associated with growing levels of income inequality. This paper explores the link between structural transformation and inequality in Indonesia by applying Theil’s L...

This paper investigates the relationship between fiscal decentralisation and economy-wide disposable income inequality. Drawing on a dataset of up to 20 OECD countries over a period from 1996 to 2011, a regression analysis is performed, relating several indicators of national income inequality...

We compare four methodologies to estimate the global distribution of income and find that many methods work well, but the method based on two-parameter distributions is more accurate than other methods. This method is simpler, easier to implement and relies on a more internationally-comparable...

As embodied in the concept of "inequality extraction" (Branko Milanovic), it is not possible to increase inequality (especially income inequality) in a society sustainably to levels beyond what is actually socially acceptable (and even less to levels endangering physical subsistence of parts of...

Over the last decades, research in behavioural economics has demonstrated that individual welfare (utility), as relevant for economic decision making, depends not only on absolut but also on distributional aspects. Moreover, evidence is gathering that something similar holds for aggregate...

The underlying idea behind the construction of indices of economic inequality is based on measuring deviations of various portions of low incomes from certain references or benchmarks, which could be point measures like the population mean or median, or curves like the hypotenuse of the right...

Additive decomposability is an interesting feature of inequality indices which, however, is not always fulfilled; solutions to overcome such an issue have been given by Deutsch and Silber (2007) and by Di Maio and Landoni (2017). In this paper, we apply these methods, based on the “Shapley...

Income distribution has been a longstanding focus of social and economic interest, but never more so than in recent times. New metrics for disadvantage and spread enable a more precise differentiation of directional asymmetry and dispersion, drawing on an internal contextual perspective. The...