Using a method-of-moments estimator, flexible three-parameter beta distributions are fitted to aggregate country-level income data to overcome an untenable assumption of previous studies that persons within each income group receive the same income. Regional and global income distributions are...

Increasing global interaction between economies over the last few decades has led to growing interest on the implications of globalization. Of particular interest has been the distributional impact of globalization and whether this has been equity enhancing. Contributing to this debate,...

This paper examines the nature and extent of global and regional income distribution and inequality using the most recent country level data on income distribution drawn from World Bank and UNU-WIDER studies for the period 1993-2000. The methodology used is a recently developed technique to fit...

Recently, there has been a resurgence of studies on the distribution of income and inequality at regional and global levels, largely driven by the concerns of economists, international development organisations and the general public about the overall effects of globalisation on growth and...

Hypothesis tests for dominance in income distributions has received considerable attention in recent literature. See, for example, Barrett and Donald (2003), Davidson and Duclos (2000) and references therein. Such tests are useful for assessing progress towards eliminating poverty and for...

As indicators of social welfare, the incidence of inequality and poverty is of ongoing concern to policy makers and researchers alike. Of particular interest are the changes in inequality and poverty over time, which are typically assessed through the estimation of income distributions. From...

Various inequality and social welfare measures often depend heavily on the choice of a distribution of income. Picking a distribution that best fits the data involves throwing away information and does not allow for the fact that a wrong choice can be made. Instead, Bayesian model averaging...

We develop a GMM procedure for estimating income distributions from grouped data with unknown group bounds. The approach enables us to obtain standard errors for the estimated parameters and functions of the parameters, such as inequality and poverty measures, and to test the validity of an...