Global inequality is a relatively recent topic. It was not until the early 1980s that the first calculations of inequality across world citizens were done.1 This is because in order to calculate global inequality, one needs to have data on (within-) national income distributions for most of the countries in the world, or at least for most of the populous and rich countries. But it is only from ...

Gaps between the poorest and the richest people and countries have continued to widen…This continues the trend of two centuries. Some have predicted convergence, but the past decade has shown increasing concentration of income among people, corporations, and countries. – UN Human Development Report 1999 …globalization has dramatically increased inequality between and within nations. – Jay Mazur...

Ilona Kickbusch’s thought provoking editorial is criticized in this commentary, partly because she fails to refer to previous critical work on the global conditions and policies that sustain inequality, poverty, poor health and damage to the biosphere and, as a result, she misreads global power and elides consideration of the fundamental historical structures of political and material power tha...

The World Distribution of Income and Income Inequality This review covers a range of measures and methods frequently employed in empirical analysis of global income inequality and global income distribution. Different determinant factors along with quantification of their impacts and empirical results from different case studies are presented. These results are further contrasted to those obtai...

We investigate the evolution of global welfare in two dimensions: income per capita and life expectancy. First, we estimate the marginal distributions of income and life expectancy separately. More importantly, we consider income and life expectancy jointly and estimate their joint global distribution for 137 countries during 1970 2000. We reach several conclusions: the global joint distributio...

ooms et al sets out some good general principles for a global social support system to improve fairer global competitiveness as a result of redistribution. this commentary sets out to summarize some of the conditions that would need to be satisfied for it to level up gradients in inequality through such a social support system, using the national basketball association (nba) example as a point ...

BACKGROUND Notions of equity are fundamental to, and drive much of the current thinking about global health. Health inequity, however, is usually measured using health inequality as a proxy - implicitly conflating equity and equality. Unfortunately measures of global health inequality do not take account of the health inequity associated with the additional, and unfair, encumbrances that poor h...