A Progress Postcard:

Billionaires by the dozen and, at least briefly,  one trillionaire have drawn a lot of public attention in this country lately and become symbols of economic inequality.

But take a step back for a global take. Equality has been on a powerful upswing for two generations now. The rise in incomes, wealth, and a share in prosperity around the world in recent decades has especially benefited the poorest.

• The Global Prosperity Gap has closed by nearly two thirds in the past 40 years. This is a new calculation the World Bank has adopted based on how far each family’s income would have to rise to meet a basic prosperity standard. It’s a measure that focuses on the poor, who have the highest gaps, while families over the standard count as a zero gap.
• These gaps  are closing in every region of the world. The most progress has been in East Asia, which had the highest (worst) gap in 1981. Sub-Saharan Africa now has the highest gap, but it has dropped by a third and is now at the level of the whole world overall in the 1980s.
• The number of countries with high inequality (over 40 in the Gini Index) has dropped from 72 to 43 in the past 30 years.
• In three out of four countries, the incomes of the poorest 40 percent grow faster than overall incomes in the five years from 2016 to 2021 (the most recent year with full international data).

The US remains a high inequality country, but inequality doesn’t appear to have been rising here for at least a decade. The Gini Index (which measures where a society falls between everyone earning exactly the same and one person garnering everything) has stayed about the same for that time once all private income, taxes, and government payments are added in.

Source: The World Bank, “Combining Income Growth with Inequality Reduction Benefits Everyone”