posts_gdocs: 1q1sbAEqbeOgit1Nzc_mEoHLqEzXs5U4ONgHgI6YQN7k

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            "slug": "global-divergence-followed-by-convergence",
            "text": "Global divergence followed by convergence",
            "title": "Global divergence followed by convergence",
            "supertitle": "",
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        },
        {
            "slug": "global-income-inequality-increased-for-two-centuries-and-is-now-falling",
            "text": "Global income inequality increased for two centuries and is now falling",
            "title": "Global income inequality increased for two centuries and is now falling",
            "supertitle": "",
            "isSubheading": false
        },
        {
            "slug": "a-look-into-the-future-of-global-inequality",
            "text": "A look into the future of global inequality",
            "title": "A look into the future of global inequality",
            "supertitle": "",
            "isSubheading": false
        },
        {
            "slug": "how-global-inequality-has-changed-from-2003-to-2013",
            "text": "How global inequality has changed from 2003 to 2013",
            "title": "How global inequality has changed from 2003 to 2013",
            "supertitle": "",
            "isSubheading": false
        },
        {
            "slug": "global-income-inequality-is-very-high-and-will-likely-stay-high-for-a-long-time",
            "text": "Global income inequality is very high and will\u00a0likely stay high for a long time",
            "title": "Global income inequality is very high and will\u00a0likely stay high for a long time",
            "supertitle": "",
            "isSubheading": false
        },
        {
            "slug": "how-long-does-it-take-for-incomes-to-grow-from-480-int-to-14-500-int",
            "text": "How long does it take for incomes to grow from 480 int-$ to 14,500 int-$?",
            "title": "How long does it take for incomes to grow from 480 int-$ to 14,500 int-$?",
            "supertitle": "",
            "isSubheading": true
        },
        {
            "slug": "inequality-within-countries-and-inequality-between-countries",
            "text": "Inequality within countries and inequality between countries",
            "title": "Inequality within countries and inequality between countries",
            "supertitle": "",
            "isSubheading": false
        }
    ],
    "body": [
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                                    "text": "This article was originally published in 2017. The data shown and discussed in the text are therefore not always the latest estimates. For more up-to-date data, see our Data Explorers on ",
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                                    "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/poverty#explore-data-poverty",
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                                        {
                                            "text": "Poverty",
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                            "children": [
                                {
                                    "text": " and ",
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                            "children": [
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                                    "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality#explore-data-poverty",
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                                        {
                                            "text": "Inequality",
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                            "children": [
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                                    "text": ".",
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                    "text": "The inequality in people\u2019s living conditions today is extremely large. The panel of charts below shows how large these differences are, and how the inequality in 12 important measures of living standards maps onto the economic inequality in the world.",
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                    "text": "What is most important for how healthy, wealthy, and educated you are is not who you are, but where you are. This was the point I made in ",
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                },
                {
                    "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality-introduction",
                    "children": [
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                            "text": "another article",
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                    "text": ". A person\u2019s knowledge, skills, and how hard they work all matter for whether they are poor or not \u2013 but all these personal factors together matter less than the one factor that is entirely outside of a person\u2019s control: whether they happen to be born into a large, productive economy or not.",
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                    "text": "How did we get here? How did the world become so unequal, and what can we expect for the future?",
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            "size": "wide",
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            "filename": "Correlates-of-GDP_How-is-life-at-different-levels-of-income.png",
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                    "text": [
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                            "text": "Global divergence followed by convergence",
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                            "text": "The chart shows estimates of the distribution of annual income among all world citizens over the last two centuries.",
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                            "text": "To make incomes comparable across countries and time, daily incomes are measured in international-$ \u2014 a hypothetical currency that would buy a comparable amount of goods and services that a U.S. dollar would buy in the United States in 2011 (for a more detailed explanation, see ",
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                        },
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                            "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/what-are-PPPs",
                            "children": [
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                                    "text": "here",
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                            "text": ").",
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                            "text": "The distribution of incomes is shown at 3 points in time:",
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                                    "text": "By 1800, few countries had achieved economic growth. The chart shows that most of the world lived in poverty with an income similar to today's poorest countries. At the beginning of the 19th century, the vast majority\u2014",
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                                    "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/poverty?insight=after-200-years-of-progress-the-fight-against-global-poverty-is-just-beginning#introduction",
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                                            "text": "roughly 80%",
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                                {
                                    "text": "\u2014of the world lived in material conditions that we would refer to as extreme poverty today.",
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                                    "text": "In 1975, 175 years later, the world had changed\u2014it had become very unequal. The world income distribution was 'bimodal', with the two-humped shape of a camel: one hump below the international poverty line and a second hump at considerably higher incomes. The world had divided into a poor, developing world and a developed world more than 10-times richer.",
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                                    "text": "Over the following 4 decades, the world income distribution has again changed dramatically. There has been a convergence in incomes: in many poorer countries, especially in South-East Asia, incomes have grown faster than in rich countries. While enormous income differences remain, the world can no longer be neatly divided into 'developed' and 'developing' countries. We have moved from a two-hump to a one-hump world. And at the same time, the distribution has also shifted to the right\u2014the incomes of many of the world's poorest citizens have increased, and extreme poverty has ",
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                                    "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-has-just-begun",
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                                            "text": "fallen faster than ever before",
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                                    "text": " in human history.",
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                            "text": "We have visualized a similar dataset from the OECD ",
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                            "url": "http://ourworldindata.org/roser/graphs/WorldIncomeDistribution1820to2000/WorldIncomeDistribution1820to2000.html",
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                                    "text": "here",
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                        {
                            "text": ".",
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                            "url": "#note-1",
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                                    "children": [
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                                            "text": "1",
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                            "text": "Global inequality in 1800, 1975, and 2015",
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                            "url": "#note-2",
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                                    "children": [
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                                            "text": "2",
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            "left": [
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                    "text": [
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                            "text": "Global income inequality increased for two centuries and is now falling",
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                            "text": "This visualization shows the distribution of incomes between 1988 and 2011. The data was compiled by the economists Branko Milanovic and Christoph Lakner.",
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                            "url": "#note-3",
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                                    "children": [
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                                            "text": "3",
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                            "text": "To see the change over time, select the years above the distribution.",
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                            "text": "The previous visualization, which showed the change from 1820 to the year 2015, is based on estimates of inflation-adjusted average incomes per country (GDP per capita) and a measure of income inequality within a country only. It gives us a rough idea of how the distribution of incomes changed, but it is not very detailed or precise. In contrast to this, the work by Branko Milanovic and Christoph Lakner is based on much more detailed household survey data. This data measures household income at each decile of the income distribution, and the two authors used this information to arrive at the global income distribution. The downside of this approach is that we can only go as far back in time as household surveys were conducted in many countries around the world.",
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                            "text": "The visualization shows the end of the long era in human history in which global inequality was increasing. Starting with industrialization in North-Western Europe, incomes in this part of the world started to increase while material prosperity in the rest of the world remained low. While some countries followed European industrialization \u2013 first Northern America, Oceania, and parts of South America and later Japan and East Asia \u2013 other countries in Asia and Africa remained poor. As a consequence of this, global inequality increased over a long period. Only in the period shown in this visualization did this change: with rapid growth in much of Asia and Latin America, the global distribution of incomes became less unequal. The incomes of the poorer half of the world population rose faster than the incomes of the richer half.",
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                    "value": "<iframe style=\"border: 0px none;\" src=\"https://ourworldindata.org/roser/graphs/WorldIncomeDistribution_LaknerAndMilanovic/WorldIncomeDistribution_LaknerAndMilanovic1988_100.html\" scrolling=\"no\" width=\"100%\" height=\"700\"></iframe>",
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                                    "text": "Global Income Distribution 1988 to 2011",
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                            "text": " ",
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                            "url": "#note-3",
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                                            "text": "3",
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                                            "text": "If you want to use this visualization for a presentation or teaching purposes, download a zip folder with an image file for every year and an animated .gif ",
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                                            "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2018/03/WorldIncomeDistribution1988to2011.zip",
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                                                    "text": "here",
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                                    "children": [
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                                            "text": ".",
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                            "text": "A look into the future of global inequality",
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                            "text": "This visualization shows how the global income distribution has changed over the decade up to 2013. Tom\u00e1\u0161 Hellebrandt and Paolo Mauro,\u00a0the authors of the paper",
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                            "url": "#note-4",
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                                    "children": [
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                                            "text": "4",
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                            "text": " from which this data is taken, confirm the finding that global inequality has declined but remains very high: the Gini coefficient of global inequality has declined from 68.7 to 64.9.",
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                            "text": "The\u00a0visualizations above show the income distribution on a logarithmic x-axis. This chart, in contrast,\u00a0plots incomes on\u00a0a linear x-axis\u00a0and thereby\u00a0emphasizes how very high global inequality still is: The bulk of the world population lives on very low incomes, and the income distribution stretches out very far to the higher incomes at the right-hand side of the chart; incomes over 14,000 international-$ are cut off as they would make this chart with a linear x-axis unreadable.",
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                            "text": "A second positive global development shown in this chart is the rise of the global median income. In 2003 half of the world's population lived on less than 1,090 international-$ per year, and the other half lived on more than 1,090 international-$. This level of global median income has almost doubled over the last decade and was\u00a02,010 international-$ in 2013.",
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                            "text": "Finally, the\u00a0authors\u00a0also dare to project\u00a0what global inequality will look like in 2035. Assuming the growth rates shown in the insert in the top-right corner, the authors project global inequality to decline further and to reach a Gini of 61.3. At the same time, the incomes of the world's poorer half would continue to increase significantly, so that the global median income could again double and reach 4,000 international-$ in 2035.",
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                            "text": "If you are looking for a visualization of only the observed global income distribution in 2003 and 2013, you can find it ",
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                            "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2013/11/2-World-Income-Distribution-2003-to-2035.png",
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                                    "text": "here",
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                            "text": ".",
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                            "text": "The global income distribution in 2003, 2013, and the projection for 2035",
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                            "url": "#note-4",
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                                    "children": [
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                                            "text": "4",
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                    "filename": "4-World-Income-Distribution-2003-to-2035-growth-rates.png",
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            "left": [
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                    "text": [
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                            "text": "How global inequality has changed from 2003 to 2013",
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                            "text": "The following visualization offers an alternative view of the data by Hellebrandt and Mauro",
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                        {
                            "url": "#note-4",
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                                            "text": "4",
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                            "text": " shown in the chart before.",
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                            "text": "The chart shows the yearly disposable income for all world citizens in both 2003 and 2013. On the x-axis, you see the\u00a0position of an individual\u00a0in the global distribution of incomes. On the logarithmic y-axis, you see the annual disposable income at that position.",
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                            "text": "The increase in prosperity\u2014and decrease in poverty\u2014is substantial. The income cut-off of the poorest 10% has increased from 260 international-$ to 480 international-%, and the median income has almost doubled from 1,100 international-$ to 2,010. Global mean income\u00a0in 2013 was 5,375 international-$.",
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                            "url": "#note-5",
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                                            "text": "5",
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                            "text": "At the same it is still the case, as emphasized before, that incomes are very low for most people in the world.",
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                    "size": "wide",
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                            "text": "The global income distribution in 2003 and 2013",
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                        {
                            "url": "#note-4",
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                                    "children": [
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                                            "text": "4",
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                    "text": [
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                            "text": "Global income inequality is very high and will\u00a0likely stay high for a long time",
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                            "text": "The visualization presents the same data in the same way, except that the y-axis is now not logarithmic but linear. This perspective shows the still very high level of global inequality even more clearly.",
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                            "text": "The previous and the following\u00a0visualization show how high global income inequality is. The\u00a0cut-off to the richest 10% of the world in 2013\u00a0was 14,500 int-$; the cut-off for the poorest 10% was 480 int-$. The ratio is 30.2.",
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                            "text": "While\u00a0global inequality is still very high, we live in a period of falling inequality. In 2003,\u00a0this ratio was 37.6. The Gini coefficient has also fallen from 68.7 to 64.9.",
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                            "text": "Taking the historical experience as a guide for what is possible in the future, we have to conclude that global inequality will remain high for a\u00a0long time. To understand this, we can ask how long it would take for those with incomes at the poorest 10% cutoff to achieve the current incomes of the richest 10% cutoff (14,500 international-$). This income level is\u00a0roughly the\u00a0level of GDP per capita\u00a0above which the\u00a0extreme poverty headcount gets close to 0% for most countries (",
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                            "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/the-share-of-people-living-in-extreme-poverty-vs-gdp-per-capita",
                            "children": [
                                {
                                    "text": "see here",
                                    "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                                }
                            ],
                            "spanType": "span-link"
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                        {
                            "text": ").",
                            "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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                            "text": "Even under a very optimistic scenario, it will take several decades for the poorest regions to\u00a0reach the income level of the global top 10%.",
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                            "text": "2% is roughly the growth rate that the richest countries of today experienced over the last decades (",
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                        },
                        {
                            "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth#economic-growth-at-the-technological-frontier-growth-in-the-usa",
                            "children": [
                                {
                                    "text": "see here",
                                    "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                                }
                            ],
                            "spanType": "span-link"
                        },
                        {
                            "text": ").\u00a0We have seen that poorer countries can achieve faster growth, but we have not seen growth rates of\u00a0more than\u00a06% over a time frame as long as necessary to reach the level of the global 10%\u00a0in such a short time. If the past is a good guide for the future, the world will likely be highly unequal for a long time.",
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                    "caption": [
                        {
                            "text": "The global income distribution in 2003 and 2013",
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                        },
                        {
                            "url": "#note-4",
                            "children": [
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                                    "children": [
                                        {
                                            "text": "4",
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                    "filename": "Global-Inc-Distribution-2003-and-2013-linear-scale.png",
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                    "text": [
                        {
                            "text": "How long does it take for incomes to grow from 480 int-$ to 14,500 int-$?",
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                        }
                    ],
                    "type": "heading",
                    "level": 3,
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                    "type": "html",
                    "value": "<table class=\"html-table\"><tbody><tr><td>2% growth</td><td>172.1 years</td></tr><tr><td>4% growth</td><td>86.9 years</td></tr><tr><td>6% growth</td><td>58.5 years</td></tr><tr><td>8% growth</td><td>44.3 years</td></tr><tr><td>10% growth</td><td>35.8 years</td></tr></tbody></table>",
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            "text": [
                {
                    "text": "Inequality within countries and inequality between countries",
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            "type": "heading",
            "level": 2,
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            "value": [
                {
                    "text": "Global inequality is driven by changes in both the inequality within countries, and the inequality between countries. This visualization shows how both of these changes determine the changing global inequality.",
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                }
            ],
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                            "text": "Inequality within countries followed a U-shape pattern over the 20th century.",
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                        }
                    ],
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                    "type": "text",
                    "value": [
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                            "text": "Inequality between countries increased over 2 centuries and peaked in the 1980s, according to the data from Bourguignon and Morrison. Since then, inequality between countries has declined.",
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                    "text": "As is shown in this visualization, the inequality of income between different countries is much higher than the inequality within countries. The consequence of this is that the trend of global inequality is very much driven by what is happening to the inequality between countries.",
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            ],
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        },
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            "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-inequality-between-world-citizens-and-its-components",
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                            {
                                "text": "The data was made available\u00a0to Our World In Data by the two authors. The data up to 2008 is published with the main publication Milanovic and Lakner (2015) \u2013Global Income Distribution. Available online at the World Bank: ",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            },
                            {
                                "url": "http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/abs/10.1596/1813-9450-6719",
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/abs/10.1596/1813-9450-6719",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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                                "spanType": "span-link"
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                                "text": ".",
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                            {
                                "text": "The\u00a0data source is: Hellebrandt, Tomas and Mauro, Paolo (2015) \u2013 The Future of Worldwide Income Distribution (April 1, 2015). Peterson Institute for International Economics Working Paper No. 15-7. Available at ",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            },
                            {
                                "url": "https://ssrn.com/abstract=2593894",
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "SSRN",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                                    }
                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-link"
                            },
                            {
                                "text": " or ",
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                            {
                                "url": "http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2593894",
                                "children": [
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                                        "text": "http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2593894",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
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                                "spanType": "span-link"
                            },
                            {
                                "text": ".",
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                        ],
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                    {
                        "type": "text",
                        "value": [
                            {
                                "text": "We thank the authors for\u00a0making the data available for this data visualization.",
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                                "text": "The data are produced by Ola Rosling and published on the website of Gapminder.",
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                            }
                        ],
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                            {
                                "text": "You can explore the Gapminder visualization of the income distributions of all countries in their interactive tool ",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            },
                            {
                                "url": "http://www.gapminder.org/tools/#_locale_id=en;&chart-type=mountain",
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "here",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                                    }
                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-link"
                            },
                            {
                                "text": ". Regarding the construction of the data, Hans and Ola Rosling note the following ",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            },
                            {
                                "url": "http://www.gapminder.org/news/data-sources-dont-panic-end-poverty/",
                                "children": [
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                                        "text": "here",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                                    }
                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-link"
                            },
                            {
                                "text": ": \u201cThis graph is constructed by combining data from multiple sources. In summary, we take the best available country estimates for the three indicators: GDP per capita, Population, and Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality). With these numbers, we can approximate the number of people at different income levels in every country. We then combine all these approximations into a global pile using the method described below under The Adjusted Global Income Scale.\u201d",
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                        "value": [
                            {
                                "text": "I have taken the data for the visualization of the world income distribution in 1820, 1970, and 2000 from van Zanden, J.L., et al. (eds.) (2014), How Was Life?: Global Well-being since 1820, OECD Publishing. Online ",
                                "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                            },
                            {
                                "url": "http://www.oecd.org/statistics/how-was-life-9789264214262-en.htm",
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "here",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                                    }
                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-link"
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                            {
                                "text": ". The plotted data is interpolated using a Cardinal spline.",
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                        "type": "text",
                        "value": [
                            {
                                "text": "The data is originally from the Clio-Infra database ",
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                            },
                            {
                                "url": "https://www.clio-infra.eu/",
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "here",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                                    }
                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-link"
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                            {
                                "text": ".",
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                            {
                                "text": "Note that global GDP per capita\u00a0in 2013 was around 14,000 international-$ and substantially higher than\u00a0mean disposable income from household-level surveys at\u00a05,375 international-$.",
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                        "value": [
                            {
                                "text": "We discuss the reasons for this discrepancy ",
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                            },
                            {
                                "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth#discrepancy-between-incomes-reported-in-household-surveys-and-gdp-per-capita",
                                "children": [
                                    {
                                        "text": "here",
                                        "spanType": "span-simple-text"
                                    }
                                ],
                                "spanType": "span-link"
                            },
                            {
                                "text": ". See also the Appendix of the original publication for a longer explanation.",
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                            }
                        ],
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    },
    "type": "article",
    "title": "The history of global economic inequality",
    "authors": [
        "Max Roser"
    ],
    "excerpt": "The inequality in people\u2019s living conditions across the world is extremely large. How did the world become so unequal, and what can we expect for the future?",
    "subtitle": "The inequality in people\u2019s living conditions across the world is extremely large. How did the world become so unequal, and what can we expect for the future?",
    "featured-image": "the-history-of-global-inequality-featured-image.png"
}