This paper contributes towards the growing debate concerning the world distribution of income and its evolution over that past three to four decades. Our methodological approach is twofold. First, we formally test for the number of modes in a cross-sectional analysis where each country is represented by one observation. We contribute to existing studies with technical improvements of the testing procedure, enabling us to draw new conclusions, and an extension of the time horizon being analyzed. Second, we estimate a global distribution of income from national log-normal distributions of income, as well as a global distribution of log-income as a mixture of national normal distributions of log-income. From this distribution we obtain measures for global inequality and poverty as well as global growth incidence curves.
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Find related papers by JEL classification: O0 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - General C5 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling I3 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare and Poverty F0 - International Economics - - General
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Theo S Eicher & Cecilia Garcia Penalosa, .
"Inequality and Growth,"
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[Downloadable!]
Michael Kremer & Alexei Onatski & James Stock, 2001.
"Searching for Prosperity,"
NBER Working Papers
8250, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
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Barro, Robert J & Sala-i-Martin, Xavier, 1992.
"Convergence,"
Journal of Political Economy,
University of Chicago Press, vol. 100(2), pages 223-51, April.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)