A consistent dataset for the net income distribution for 190 countries, aggregated to 32 geographical regions and the world from 1958–2015

Abstract. Data on income distributions within and across countries are becoming increasingly important to inform analysis of income inequality and to understand 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 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 principal components-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 and the world as a whole. Our aggregation method takes into account both within-country and across-country income inequality when aggregating to the regional level. This dataset will enable more robust analysis of income distribution at multiple scales.