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.
http://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.