Global Inequality: Beyond the Bottom Billion
A Rapid Review of Income Distribution
in 141 Countries
Isabel Ortiz and Matthew Cummins^24
iewed as an “unwelcomed” and “politically sensitive” topic,
world income inequality received little attention in
international fora for decades. In 2004, however, theInternational Labour Organization (ILO) published its pioneering
report on the social dimension of globalization, A Fair Globalization.
Soon after, major development institutions began to focus flagship
publications on inequality, including the United Nations 2005
Report on the World Social Situation, The Inequality Predicament, the
United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) 2005 Human
Development Report, Aid, Trade and Security in an Unequal World, the
World Bank’s 2006 World Development Report, Equity and
Development, and the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) 2007
World Economic Outlook, Globalization and Inequality. UNICEF also
initiated its Global Study on Child Poverty and Disparities in 2007,
and the United Nations University’s World Institute for
Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) released a
comprehensive study, The World Distribution of Household
Wealth, in 2008 based on its World Income Inequality Database.
More recently, the World Bank opened a research line fully devoted
to global inequality: Poverty and Inequality. The unanimous drive of
international institutions to understand and focus attention on
income disparities shows that inequality can no longer be avoided in
development policy discussions.
This paper focuses exclusively on income inequality. While income
is just one measure of inequality, it is often closely associated with
social inequalities in terms of coverage and outcomes. There are
(^24) Isabel Ortiz is Associate Director, Policy and Practice, UNICEF
Matthew Cummins is Social and Economic Policy Specialist, Division of Policy
and Practice, UNICEF