Institutional Contractual Agreement United Nations University and Fundación para el apoyo de las Ciencias Económicas

Abstract

UNU-WIDER is a leading international development economics think tank. The Institute provides economic analysis and policy advice with the aim of promoting sustainable and equitable development for all. The Institute began operations in 1985 in Helsinki, Finland, as the first research centre of the United Nations University. Today it is a unique blend of think tank, research institute, and UN agency – providing a range of services from policy advice to governments, as well as original research that is ‘open access’. More information on UNU-WIDER´s current work programme, is available at: www.wider.unu.edu. There is a growing need to understand income inequality trends and how they interplay with other social economic, and political outcomes, both at the country level and worldwide. Despite significant progress during the last decades in improving the availability of data to study inequalities, substantial constraints still limit our ability to conduct consistent cross-country comparisons and analyses of long-term trends of income distributions. This project aims to better understand inequality – how it varies, why it varies, and what the implications of this might be –and to offer new frameworks that provide insight into how to address it. It maps empirical patterns and trends in inequalities and builds our understanding of inequality as both an outcome and a causal variable. UNU-WIDER has contributed to this important task by hosting and updating the Word Income Inequality Database (WID), which includes all of the main survey-based data on income distributions which is available for most countries. Since March 2021, UNU-WIDER also releases alongside the WID two companion datasets, one with information abouth the income distribution at the country level for 200 countries and historical entities, the other with estimates of the global income distribution. The project mainly helps to monitor the progress made in achieving SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities. Provision of the WIID, a global public good, may also be instrumental to policy makers’ ability to analyse the role that reducing inequality can in achieving other SDGs. …