What Do We Know about Global Income Inequality

By S. Anand, P. Segal. 2008

322 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we review the recent literature on global interpersonal income inequality. While all estimates agree that the level is very high, with a Gini of between 0.630 and 0.686 in the 1990s, there is no consensus regarding the direction of change. We discuss methodological issues, including the use of national accounts versus survey-based estimates of mean income (or consumption) and the choice of purchasing power parity exchange rates. Findings of a rise or fall in global income inequality are not robust across different estimation methods and datasets. Given the diversity of estimates and various sources of uncertainty, including gaps and errors in the underlying data, we conclude there is insufficient evidence to determine the direction of change in global interpersonal inequality in recent decades.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c7418708ad9c988cfa4d66721293ec1ac8a1b27a

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Citations in the corpus

The Redistributive Effects of Tax Benefit Systems in the Enlarged EU (2010, background): “Especially regarding the analysis of the development of income inequality across countries and time, a large number of empirical studies exists (see Anand and Segal (2008) for a recent overview). Due to data limitations, the development of the size of redistribution across countries and time is not ”
Resource Rents, Redistribution, and Halving Global Poverty: The Resource Dividend (2011, background): “non-comparability; see Anand and Segal (2008) for discussion of this and”
Global Inequality of Opportunity: How Much of Our Income Is Determined by Where We Live? (2014, methodology): “In addition, the Theil (0) index has a feature, pointed out by Anand and Segal (2008), that it is internally consistent: thus, eliminating all between-country inequality would leave the within-country inequality component unchanged, which is not the case with Theil (1) index.”
Lights, Camera … Income! Illuminating the National Accounts-Household Surveys Debate (2016, background): “…Sala-i-Martin (2006), Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin (2009, 2014) and Bourguignon (2015) use national accounts GDP per capita, while Milanovic (2005), Anand and Segal (2008), and Lackner and Milanovic (2013) use or advance arguments in favor of household surveys. show that the choice of which series…”
Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession (2013, unknown): “In our baseline results, we use the 2005 PPP exchange rates, which are more robust than earlier rounds (Anand and Segal 2008; Deaton and Heston 2010; Ravallion 2010; Ackland, Dowrick, and Freyens 2013).”
Global Income Inequality in Numbers: in History and Now (2013, background): “Anand and Segal (2008), in a review of global inequality studies, suggest that it is the most appropriate inequality index for this kind of decomposition.”
The Global Distribution of Income (2014, methodology): “We do not discuss PPP exchange rates in detail (q.v. Anand and Segal, 2008), but we highlight some of the features and controversies that are most relevant for studying the global distribution of income.”