Authors: François Bourguignon, Francisco Ferreira, Martin Ravallion, and Branko Milanovic

Publication: The Princeton Encyclopedia of the World Economy. pp. 542-550

Editors: Kenneth A. Reiner, Ramkishen S. Rajan, Amy Jocelyn Glass, and Lewis S. Davis

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Date: January 2009

Excerpt: 

Prevailing concerns about economic inequity in the world reflect many aspects of living standards and how they are distributed, and no single measure can hope to capture all those concerns. As conventionally measured, ‘‘inequality’’ and ‘‘poverty’’ are quite different aspects of income distribution, in that the former focuses on the (absolute or relative) disparities in income (or consumption), while the latter focuses on absolute levels of deprivation, which depend on the average levels of living in society as well as inequality.

Link: Global Inequality and Poverty (PDF)