A graph of global inequality from:
Branko Milanovic, Global Income Inequality: What it Is and why it Matters? World Economics, Vol. 7, No. 1, January-March 2006.
The figure compares the income distribution within France, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and Rural Indonesia. The graph shows that the poorest 5% of France are richer than the top 5% rural Indonesians. The poorest 5% rural Indonesian are richer than the poorest 5% of Brzil, but the richest 5% of Brazil are as rich as the top 5% of France.
Branko Milanovic, a world bank economist, is one of the world’s top experts on inequality. His 2005 book Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality is an excellent clear introduction to the problems of understanding global inequality.
via Tim Holland.
www.gapminder.org
The best resource for historical time series data and future projections of income, lifetime expectancy, infant death, etc.
Gapminder is a good site, which we’ve mentioned several times before, but unfortunately it doesn’t have data on global inequality.
Gapminder do have a presentation (flash) on global income distribution. It is in default in Swedish but you can easily change language to english.
http://www.gapminder.org/downloads/presentations/human-development-trends-2005.html
The GapMinder visualizations of the estimates of world income are nice. It would be great if inequality were in the gapminder/google dynamic visualizer. However, there are a lot of problems with the quality and comparability of inequality estimates from non-rich countries.
The Gapminder visualizations are, I think, from Xavier Sala-I-Martin’s 2006 paper - The World Distribution of Income: Falling Poverty and Convergence, Period!” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. I will post something on this paper in the future, as it is very interesting paper, which is also a bit controversial.