An Effective Method for Analyzing Regional and Universal Poverty and Inequality with Only a Few Quantiles

For most countries and years, only a few quantiles of the income distribution are available. While from this limited information, it is already a challenge to derive interesting parameter like inequality or poverty for the individual countries this becomes even more involved if one wants to integrate this information over regions or the entire world. An effective statistical method is proposed to do both, derive parameter of interest from a few quantiles, and to consistently integrate income over different countries to obtain the regional or global income distribution. Thereby we also overcome statistical problems that occur due to divisions or unions of countries. We use the method to analyze the development of national, regional and global income, poverty and inequality for the period 1980-2013 only based on income quintiles of 178 countries