Wealth & distribution
Inequality across countries
How concentrated income and wealth are, and how that has moved over a century, from the maintained public series rather than any single headline. Income and wealth concentration come from WID.world (the Piketty-Saez-Zucman distributional accounts, measured on equal-split adults); Gini coefficients from World Bank PIP surveys and the OECD, cross-checked against the UNU-WIDER WIID; and global poverty from PIP at the poverty lines the World Bank rebased to 2021 purchasing power parities in June 2025. Fiscal-data top shares and survey Ginis measure different things and are never mixed in one ranking, and where the field's headline number is genuinely contested, as the US top-1% income share is, both estimates are shown.
Data as of WID.world (income/wealth shares to 2024), World Bank PIP (release 20260324, 2021 PPP), OECD IDD, UNU-WIDER WIID (29 April 2025)
Income concentration: the top 10% share
The share of pre-tax national income going to the top 10%, measured on equal-split adults (each adult in a couple assigned half the couple's income). At 2024 the range runs from Iraq at 70.9% to Slovakia at 26.8%. WID extends every country's series to the most recent years by extrapolation, so the newest cross-section values are estimates; the long-run lines below carry more information than any single recent year. Bangladesh and the major economies are highlighted.
Source: WID.world, pre-tax national income (sptinc), equal-split adults, 2024. Share of the top 10%. Recent years are extrapolated by WID; ranking is a position in a distribution, not a score.
A century of divergence
The same measure since 1900 for eight economies. The English-speaking and emerging-market paths show the U-shape and the sustained climb; the continental European paths are flatter, an L-shape by comparison. In 2023, the top 10% took 46.8% of pre-tax income in the United States against 34.0% in France and 42.4% in Bangladesh.
Source: WID.world, pre-tax national income, equal-split adults. Share of the top 10%.
The US top-1% income share is contested by construction
The single most-cited inequality statistic is also the least settled. The line below is the WID series, which maintains the Piketty-Saez-Zucman estimate: the top 1% took 20.7% of US pre-tax national income in 2024. Using the same tax data but allocating untaxed and retained income differently, Auten and Splinter find top shares markedly lower and roughly flat since the 1960s. Neither is refuted; the gap is the current state of knowledge, and this page shows both.
Two estimates, both published, both defensible
For 2014, a like-for-like comparison of the top 1% share of fiscal income: Piketty and Saez put it at 21.5%, the Congressional Budget Office at 16.7%, and Auten and Splinter at 13.1%. The gap comes from how each allocates income that never appears on individual tax returns: retained corporate earnings, underreported income, and imputed pension and government income. The methodology explains what drives the divergence.
Sources: Piketty, Saez and Zucman (Quarterly Journal of Economics 133(2), 2018), maintained in the World Inequality Database. Auten and Splinter, "Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends", Journal of Political Economy 132(7), 2024, pp. 2179-2227; the 2014 comparison is from Auten and Splinter, AEA Papers and Proceedings 109, 2019, pp. 307-311.
Wealth concentration is a different object
Wealth is a stock and income is a flow; a country can pair low income inequality with high wealth concentration, so the two are never combined into one ranking. Sweden is the standard illustration: its top 10% take 29.0% of income (2024), among the lowest anywhere, while its top 1% hold 27.5% of net personal wealth (2024), well above the low end. The chart ranks the top 1% share of net personal wealth, equal-split adults, at 2024.
Source: WID.world, net personal wealth (shweal), equal-split adults, 2024. Wealth series carry wider extrapolation than income; treat the newest years as estimates.
Top 1% wealth share over the long run
Source: WID.world, net personal wealth, equal-split adults. Share of the top 1%.
Gini coefficients: three survey measures side by side
Survey-based Gini coefficients from three sources, each on its own basis and shown with its year rather than blended. The OECD figure is disposable (post-tax, post-transfer) income, current definition; PIP is the World Bank survey Gini with its welfare concept (income or consumption); WIID is UNU-WIDER's latest High-quality observation. They disagree precisely because they measure different concepts: Bangladesh reads 0.309 on PIP consumption (2022) but 0.499 on WIID income (2022). Bangladesh is absent from the OECD, which covers members and a few key partners only; that gap is shown, not hidden.
| Economy | OECD disposable | PIP survey | WIID (High) |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 0.394 (2023) | 0.418 (2024, inc.) | 0.478 (2023) |
| United Kingdom | 0.367 (2023) | 0.324 (2021, inc.) | 0.350 (2023) |
| France | 0.299 (2023) | 0.318 (2023, inc.) | 0.296 (2023) |
| Germany | 0.307 (2023) | 0.337 (2022, inc.) | 0.422 (2023) |
| Japan | 0.338 (2021) | 0.323 (2020, inc.) | 0.307 (2021) |
| Italy | 0.325 (2023) | 0.343 (2023, inc.) | 0.409 (2023) |
| Canada | 0.306 (2023) | 0.315 (2022, inc.) | 0.432 (2021) |
| Sweden | 0.289 (2024) | 0.293 (2023, inc.) | 0.411 (2023) |
| Denmark | 0.276 (2022) | 0.299 (2023, inc.) | 0.417 (2023) |
| Norway | 0.259 (2023) | 0.265 (2023, inc.) | 0.343 (2023) |
| Korea | 0.323 (2023) | 0.329 (2021, inc.) | 0.426 (2021) |
| Mexico | 0.400 (2022) | 0.426 (2024, inc.) | 0.426 (2022) |
| Chile | 0.448 (2022) | 0.430 (2024, inc.) | 0.447 (2022) |
| Brazil | 0.451 (2022) | 0.503 (2024, inc.) | 0.515 (2023) |
| South Africa | 0.618 (2017) | 0.541 (2022, cons.) | 0.619 (2017) |
| India | 0.495 (2011) | 0.255 (2022, cons.) | 0.359 (2012) |
| China (People’s Republic of) | 0.514 (2011) | 0.360 (2022, cons.) | 0.465 (2023) |
| Indonesia | not covered | 0.344 (2025, cons.) | 0.391 (2017) |
| Viet Nam | not covered | 0.361 (2022, cons.) | 0.372 (2018) |
| Bangladesh | not covered | 0.309 (2022, cons.) | 0.499 (2022) |
Source: OECD IDD disposable-income Gini, current definition (METH2012), 0-1 scale. World Bank PIP survey Gini, national, latest survey. UNU-WIDER WIID latest High-quality observation (native 0-100 scale shown here on 0-1). WIID quality flags across the full base: 20,238 High of 26,161 observations, 200 economies.
Disposable-income Gini over time
Source: OECD IDD, disposable-income Gini, current definition (METH2012), total population, shown on the 0-100 Gini scale.
Global poverty at the 2021-PPP lines
The World Bank rebased its international poverty lines to 2021 purchasing power parities in June 2025: the extreme-poverty line rose from $2.15 to $3.00 a day, with $4.20 and $8.30 companions. At the $3.00 line, the world extreme-poverty rate fell from 43.4% in 1990 to 10.4% in 2024, the latest year with survey-based estimates, or 847 million people. The fall was not monotonic: the rate rose from 10.8% in 2019 to 11.4% in 2020 as the pandemic hit. Estimates after 2024 are nowcasts; PIP nowcasts 826 million below the line in 2026.
| Line (a day, 2021 PPP) | World rate | People below | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| $3.00 (extreme) | 10.4% | 847 million | 2024 (actual) |
| $4.20 | 18.9% | 1541 million | 2024 (actual) |
| $8.30 | 46.1% | 3751 million | 2024 (actual) |
Source: World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform PIP release 20260324, 2021 PPP. Lines from the World Bank's June 2025 poverty-line update. Latest actual year 2024; later years are nowcasts.
Method, units and the estimate contests are documented in the methodology. Related: the household balance sheets and net-worth distribution on wealth, asset-return histories on returns, what taxes and transfers do to these Ginis on redistribution, the same indicators ranked on rankings, and each economy's own page in the country directory.