The global income distribution for high-income countries

Mikkel Hermansen
Additional contact information
Mikkel Hermansen: OECD

No 1402, OECD Economics Department Working Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: This paper presents the global income distribution between all individuals living in the developed world. Global inequality for the group of high-income countries, as measured by the Gini coefficient, stands at 37 in 2013 and has increased by almost 3 Gini points since the mid-1990s. This was mainly driven by top 10% incomes growing more than middle and lower incomes and the bottom 10% falling behind. Rising inequality within the United States drives almost half of the inequality increase among high-income countries, a combination of a sizeable rise in inequality and a population share around a third in the sample. The broad global middle in high-income countries, located from the 10th to the 90th percentile, experienced strikingly similar disposable income growth, but at a very slow annualised rate around 0.5%. Robustness analyses show that this low-growth result is sensitive to declining real incomes in Japan and that scaling micro-based incomes to national accounts means, to include in-kind transfers such as healthcare and educational services, lifts measured household income growth substantially. Finally, the paper delivers a methodological contribution by decomposing the global growth incidence curve into within- and between-country components, allowing for a more granular assessment of the development than is possible by decomposing inequality indices. The decomposition shows that between-country income differences contributed little to growing inequality in the group of high-income countries.

Keywords: between-country inequality; Global inequality; high-income countries; income distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 F60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-07-19
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/65206dc1-en (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:ecoaaa:1402-en

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OECD Economics Department Working Papers from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().