Global Income Distribution and Inequality: 1993 and 2000

Duangkamon Chotikapanich, William Griffiths (), D.S. Prasada Rao () and Vicar Valencia

No 1062, Department of Economics - Working Papers Series from The University of Melbourne

Abstract: The nature of global and regional income distributions and the extent of inequality are examined using country-level data on income distributions drawn from World Bank studies and the World Institute for Development Economics Research for the period 1993 - 2000. Beta-2 income distributions are fitted to population and income share data for 91 countries. Regional and global income distributions are obtained as population weighted mixtures of the country-specific income distributions. Gini and Theil inequality measures for countries, regions and the world are expressed in terms of the parameters of the beta-2 distributions, and, for regions and the world, decomposed into their within- and between-country components. Empirical results show a high degree of global inequality, but with some evidence of inequality decreasing between the two years, with the decrease being largely attributable to growth in China.

Keywords: beta-2 distribution; mixture distribution; Gini coefficient; Theil index; inequality decomposition. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 C16 D31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mlb:wpaper:1062

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