Authors: Branko Milanovic and Christoph Lakner

Date: December 2013

The database has been created specifically for the paper “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession”, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 6719, December 2013, published also in World Bank Economic Review (electronically available from 12 August 2015). Its origins, however, go back further in time, to the creation of the PovcalNet database by the World Bank Research Department in the early 1990s, and to the 1999 paper on global inequality by Milanovic.

The objective of the LM-WPID database was to create both a balanced and unbalanced panel of country-deciles covering the twenty year period 1988-2008, expressed in common currency and prices (2005 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) dollars derived from the 2005 International Comparison Project). The database thus allows comparisons of average incomes by decile both across time and across countries. In other words, it allows the comparison of (say) the average real income of the 2nd decile of the US income distribution in 1988 with the average real income of the 8th decile of Brazilian income distribution in 2008.

The data, explanation of the variables and the relevant papers can be downloaded here:

Link: Description of the Lakner-Milanovic (2013) World Panel Income Distribution (LM-WPID) Database (PDF)

Link: Dataset (dta) 

Related Research: Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession