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Title: A consistent dataset for the net income distribution for 190 countries and aggregated to 32 geographical regions from 1958 to 2015

Journal Article · · Earth System Science Data (Online)

Abstract. Data on income distributions within and across countries are becoming increasingly important for informing analysis of income inequality and understanding the distributional consequences of climate change. While datasets on income distribution collected from household surveys are available for multiple countries, these datasets often do not represent the same concept of inequality (or income concept) and therefore make comparisons across countries, over time and across datasets difficult. Here, we present a consistent dataset of income distributions across 190 countries from 1958 to 2015 measured in terms of net income. We complement the observed values in this dataset with values imputed from a summary measure of the income distribution, specifically the Gini coefficient. For the imputation, we use a recently developed nonparametric principal-component-based approach that shows an excellent fit to data on income distributions compared to other approaches. We also present another version of this dataset aggregated from the country level to 32 geographical regions. Our dataset is developed for the purpose of calibrating models such as integrated human–Earth system models with detailed data on income distributions. This dataset will enable more robust analysis of income distribution at multiple scales. The latest version of our data are available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7093997 (Narayan et al., 2022b).

Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-76RL01830
OSTI ID:
2350721
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 2448372
Journal Information:
Earth System Science Data (Online), Journal Name: Earth System Science Data (Online) Journal Issue: 5 Vol. 16; ISSN 1866-3516
Publisher:
Copernicus GmbHCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
Germany
Language:
English

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