PNNL

Abstract

Data on income distributions within and across countries are becoming increasingly important to inform analysis of income inequality and human welfare. While datasets on income distribution collected from household surveys are available for multiple countries, these datasets often do not represent the same income concept and therefore make comparisons across countries, over time and across datasets difficult. Here, we present a consistent dataset of income distributions across 184 countries from 1958 to 2015 measured in terms of net income. We complement the observed values in this dataset with values imputed from a summary measure of the income distribution, specifically the GINI coefficient. For the imputation, we use a recently developed principal components-based approach that shows an excellent fit to data on income distributions compared to other approaches. We also present another version of this dataset aggregated from the country level to 32 geographical regions and the world as a whole. Our aggregation method takes into account both within-country and across-country income inequality when aggregating to the regional level. This dataset will enable more robust analysis of income distribution at multiple scales.