While the literature has made important strides in addressing what constitutes an appropriate measure of inequality, analyses of global income distribution are still plagued with serious data problems, including the limitations of traditional databases and the poor comparability of data despite some obvious improvements in the availability of income inequality data mainly spawned by the pioneering work of Deininger and Squire (1996).

Given the recent considerable interest and concern about the distributional effects of increasing globalization, there is even a more present need for reliable datasets that permits meaningful comparison of inequality not only within countries but across regions and nations. Even in the presence of a reliable global income distribution dataset, in the absence of global determinants of household income (such as educational attainment, age, household size and composition, occupation of the household head, etc.) there is little scope for understanding the causes behind the global inequality we observed.

The GIDD database is not a mere compilation of secondary cross-country inequality indices. Instead, it is an actual presentation of a truly global income distribution based entirely on household survey data. Additionally, the GIDD global income distribution data includes information on the conditional distribution of important household income determinants like education, age, household size, among others.

The dataset version 1.0 is available as an EXCEL file (583 KB) or as a STATA zip file (86 KB).

Our ultimate goal is to assemble existing representative household data for all countries on the globe, standardize them so that they are internationally comparable, and make the minimal distribution data available to researchers in a ready-to-use format for the analysis of global income distribution. This goal is motivated by the publicly non-availability of data on global income distribution (and its determinants) limiting the ability of researchers to identify the positions of each country in the global income distribution.

A full description of how the GIDD dataset was constructed is available from:

Ackah, Charles, Maurizio Bussolo, Rafael De Hoyos, and Denis Medvedev (2009), “A New Dataset on Global Income Distribution,” Unpublished. The World Bank.