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Perspectives on the World Income Distribution - Beyond Twin Peaks Towards Welfare Conclusions

Author

Listed:
  • Hajo Holzmann

    (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen / Germany)

  • Sebastian Vollmer

    (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen / Germany)

  • Julian Weisbrod

    (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen / Germany)

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Hajo Holzmann & Sebastian Vollmer & Julian Weisbrod, 2007. "Perspectives on the World Income Distribution - Beyond Twin Peaks Towards Welfare Conclusions," Ibero America Institute for Econ. Research (IAI) Discussion Papers 158, Ibero-America Institute for Economic Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:got:iaidps:158
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
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    2. T. Paul Schultz, 1998. "Inequality in the distribution of personal income in the world: How it is changing and why," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 11(3), pages 307-344.
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    Cited by:

    1. Dai, J. & Sperlich, S., 2010. "Simple and effective boundary correction for kernel densities and regression with an application to the world income and Engel curve estimation," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 54(11), pages 2487-2497, November.
    2. Lahoti Rahul & Jayadev Arjun & Reddy Sanjay, 2016. "The Global Consumption and Income Project (GCIP): An Overview," Journal of Globalization and Development, De Gruyter, vol. 7(1), pages 61-108, June.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Convergence; Silverman's test; non-parametric statistics; bimodal; global income distribution; poverty; inequality; growth incidence curves;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O0 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - General
    • C5 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling
    • I3 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty
    • F0 - International Economics - - General

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