World Income Distribution

Our Mathematica notebook uses the detailed information gathered by research consortium WID relative to the distribution of income (not wealth) in most world countries as well as the net national income (GDP minus consumption of fixed capital plus foreign income) for 2019 converted into USD at purchasing power parities; we employ the percentiles shares of pre-tax national income among equal-split adults as well as thousandth for the top 1% for added precision. For each available country, we create a sample income distribution of size 1‰ of its 2019 population; we then pool all the samples together and sort to obtain the world income distribution (of nearly 8 million points). To account for the super wealthy, we lastly add the 3 quartiles of the Forbes billionaires list (2650 people); we estimate income from net worth in two ways, either by assuming a 3% yearly net return or dividing net worth by years of activity after the age of 25; the two distributions are very similar.

Since the world population is nearing 8 billions people, we split it into 8 bins of one billion people each to display income ranges and bins’ median.

We also present two alternative graphs, the Ladder showing the income of one hundred people picked at random in the world (with a close-up at the top 1%) and Pen’s parade of 10 000 picked at random in the world, ordered by income.

Nicolas Boccard, UdG