Visualization: World Map of Income Inequality

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From the course by Universiteit Leiden

Political Economy of Institutions and Development

150 ratings

Universiteit Leiden

Political Economy of Institutions and Development

150 ratings

This course is part of the SDG initiative <http://www.sdginitiative.org/> addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals, specifically for the following SDGs [1, 8, 10 and 16]. We hope you will join in our efforts to reach the SDG’s in small but measurable and actionable ways, cooperating with Development Done Differently. Expand your impact. You can create a better world. In today’s world, politics and economics are interconnected, but what is the nature of this connectivity? What are the power relationships that shape the world economy today and create new challenges for international institutions facing globalization? What makes some countries wealthier than others? Do we face cultural diversity or fragmentation? Does the type of governance effect economic development and social change or is it the other way around? How do we measure it and how trustworthy is the data? These issues and many more will be examined in this course along with a wide library of sources and a biting criticism.

From the lesson

Society and Fragmentation

Inequality and Fragmentation. Examines how society can be fragmented along lines of religion, language, ethnicity and income

Ethnic Fragmentation8:40

Visualization: World Map of Ethnic Fragmentation2:11

Linguistic Fragmentation7:47

Visualization: World Map of Linguistic Diversity2:57

Religious Fragmentation6:37

Visualization: World Map of Religious Diversity1:49

Income and Wealth Inequality9:14

Visualization: World Map of Income Inequality4:23

Inequality, Fragmentation and Trust8:00

Meet the Instructors

Richard Thomas Griffiths
Prof. dr.
Faculty of Humanities

In the lecture, we voice some reservations about the recent book by Thomas Piketty.

His data was limited in scope to a handful of rich Western countries.

What he suggested was that using the GINI index,

labor income inequality in Europe was naught 0.26.

And that's in the United States, so that naught 0.36.

But this leaves the question of what the picture is elsewhere in the world.

Now for several years the World Bank has been assembling information on the less

developed countries.

The results are based on income data from households,

derived from household surveys and not from national text record.

The compilers of the index had met, that is what I would call a dirty data set.

But they argued that if they aimed at perfect compatibility,

they'd have to eliminate too many countries.

And if they tried to correct the data in some way, they might be inserting even

more biases than the ones they were trying to eliminate.

There are two main issues.

The first is that there is no distinction between single earner households and

multiple earner households.

And then equality tends to be reduced in the multiple earner households for

obvious reasons.

The second issue is it takes no accounts of non-income benefits,

such as free education or primary health care.

The compilers of the index warn, we therefore caution researchers

who use this data to interpret the results carefully.

Now we’ve taken the data from only the years 2010 and 11,

which gives us data for 60 countries.

This map shows the countries for which data was missing.

It includes all the richer Western countries which the World Bank didn't

even attempt to include, but also large sways of the rest of the world.

Now the index is expressed in a range of 0 to 100.

With the lowest number expressing the greatest degree of homogeneity,

and the highest showing the greatest diversity.

We plotted the range for you to see.

And we've also indicated the Piketty estimates for Europe and

the United States.

And it's clear that many less developed countries

are in an even worse position than the United States,

which was such a concern, or cause of concern to Thomas Piketty.

Now, let's scroll through the map.

Already in the first decile, we are leaving Europe behind,

assuming of course that the non income transfers in Europe

are more developed then those in Belarus or Kazakstan.

In the fourth decile, we cross the GINI index for the United States.

It's equivalent here is Cambodia, and once again, we can assume that American

welfare spending is more than developed than in Cambodia.

We'll pause here, and you can see Macedonia entering.

In the next decile, you'll see Malaysia, but for the rest, the greatest inequality

levels are concentrated in Central and South America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2011, the OECD published a separate report on income inequality

in its member states and in several of the emerging economies.

This report is based on income data derived from tax accounts from 2008, and

it doesn't use the kind of household surveys employed by the World Bank.

So remember, these two sets of data are not comparable.

Since there are only 38 states with more than 1.5 million in the map,

we've shown it together in just one map.

But again, it does underlie the comparably high levels of inequality

in the emerging economies.

Well, we hope you've enjoyed this visualization.

I remind you that both sets of data are in the database accompanying this course.

But please, remember the warning.

Exercise extreme caution in interpreting the results.

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