In this paper we analyze the world´s cross-national distribution of income and its evolution from 1970 to 2003. We argue that modeling this distribution by a finite mixture and investigating its number of components has advantages over nonparametric inference concerning the number of modes. In...

This paper contributes towards the growing debate concerning the world distribution of income and its evolution over that past three to four decades. Our methodological approach is twofold. First, we formally test for the number of modes in a cross-sectional analysis where each country is...

We estimate and analyze the global income distribution from national log-normal income distributions for the years 1970 to 2003, as well as the income distribution of seven regional subsamples. From these distributions we obtain measures for global and regional inequality and poverty, and find...

Since most poor live in rural areas, primarily engaged in low productivity farm activity, the pathway out of poverty must be strongly connected to productivity increases, whether they are realised in farming, rural non-farm enterprises or via urban migration. By utilizing the IFLS panel dataset...

Indonesia is, what the World Development Report 2008 calls, a transforming country characterized by increasing rural-urban income disparities and high poverty rates. Bearing these facts in mind, it is striking how little is known about causes and mechanism of the underlying determinants of...

In this paper we analyze the distribution of fertility rates across the world using parametric mixture models. We demonstrate the existence of twin peaks and the division of the world's countries in two distinct components: a high-fertility regime and a low fertility regime. Whereas the...

Since early 2008 interim trade agreements between the EU and six regions of ACP countries (respectively sub-groups within the region) are in force. These agreements could be stepping stones towards full Economic Partnership Agreements between the EU and all ACP countries. We estimate the welfare...

We analyze the cross-national distribution of GDP per capita and its evolution from 1970 to 2003. We argue that peaks are not a suitable measure for distinct growth regimes, because the number of peaks is not invariant under strictly monotonic transformations of the data (e.g. original vs. log...

We investigate to what extent convergence in production levels per worker has been achieved in Germany since unification. To this end, we model the distribution of GDP per employee across German districts using two-component normal mixtures. While in the first year after unification, the two...