Data for: Global interpersonal income inequality decline: the role of China and India
Description
Global income inequality database Global interpersonal income inequality is an important concept for a number of reasons. Indicators of income distribution, such as quantile income shares and the Gini coefficient, are available for individual countries, but from official statistical sources they are not available for the world as a whole or for various country groups. This database includes estimates for global interpersonal income inequality from 1988 to 2015 in 145 countries that account for 95 percent of global population. It also includes regional income inequality estimates within the groups of advanced countries, emerging countries, and six regional country groups: Developing Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Commonwealth of Independent States, European Union (EU), Latin America and Middle East/North Africa. It also includes estimates for non-EU advanced countries. The estimates are based on the two-parameter distribution method, which we found to be the most robust among four alternative methods. The database includes six versions of this method by considering three alternative distributions (the log-normal distribution, the Pareto distribution and the Weibull distribution) both in a deterministic and in a stochastic setting. We plan to update the dataset regularly.