indices by ten or more points. Much of the major improvements in
inequality, however, appear to have taken place during the 1990s.
While the average reduction in a country’s Gini index value was 7.3
points, on average, between 1990 and 2000, this fell to 3.3 points
between 2000 and 2008. In any case, the best performers over the
near period include Burundi, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali and
Sierra Leone, all of which reduced their Gini index values by two or
more points since 2000.
Despite the positive signs of progress, the region still hosts some of
the world’s most unequal countries, including Namibia and South
Africa. For high-income countries in our sample, which cover a
broad mix of countries from North America, Eastern and Western
Europe, and the Pacific Rim, among others, a wide range of trends
are evident (Figure 16). On the one hand, Estonia, Hong Kong,
Israel, Japan, Latvia, Slovakia and Slovenia are cases of significant
increases in income inequality when looking at the 1990-2008 time
period, all of which increased their Gini indices by six or more
points. On the flip side, Denmark, Ireland, South Korea, and
Trinidad and Tobago are successful examples of reducing income
disparities over the last decades. In the more recent period,
Belgium, Croatia, Estonia, New Zealand, Spain, South Korea and
Sweden stand out as having reduced income inequality, each of
which lowered its Gini index value by two or more points since
- Also interesting is the fact that many of the larger high-
income countries achieved negligible change in inequality since
2000, as the Gini indices in Austria, Canada, France, Italy, Poland
and the United States increased or decreased by less than one point.