The World Distribution of Income: Falling Poverty And... Convergence, Period(*)

We estimate the WDI by integrating individual income distributions for 138 countries between 1970 and 2000. Country distributions are constructed by combining national accounts GDP per capita to anchor the mean with survey data to pin down the dispersion. Poverty rates and headcounts are reported for four specific poverty lines. Rates in 2000 were between one-third and one-half of what they were in 1970 for all four lines. There were between 250 and 500 million fewer poor in 2000 than in 1970. We estimate eight indexes of income inequality implied by our world distribution of income. All of them show reductions in global inequality during the 1980s and 1990s. (*) Columbia University. This paper was partly written when I was visiting Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. I thank Sanket Mohapatra for extraordinary research assistance and for comments and suggestions. I also benefited from the comments of Tony Atkinson, Victoria Baranov, Gary Becker, François Bourguignon, Gideon du Rand, Ed Glaeser, Richard Freeman, Laila Haider, Allan Heston, Larry Katz, Michael Kremer, Casey B. Mulligan, Kevin Murphy, Martin Ravallion, and seminar participants at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Harvard University, University of Chicago, Columbia University, the American Enterprise Institute, Universidad de Santander, Fordham University, and the International Monetary Fund. I would like to thank the NSF Grant 20-3367-00-0-79-447 and the Spanish MEC Grants SEC2001-0674 and SEC 2001-0769 for financial support.