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

This is a data record which corresponds to the paper "A consistent dataset for the net income distribution for 184 countries, aggregated to 32 geographical regions and the world from 1958-2015" (Narayan et al. 2023, in prep)

Description/Abstract- Data on the income distribution within and across countries are increasingly becoming important to inform analysis on income inequality and human welfare. While datasets on the 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 and across datasets difficult. Here, we present a consistent dataset on the income distribution across 184 countries which all represent a single income concept namely net-income. We complement the observed values in this dataset with values of the income distribution imputed from summary measures such as the GINI coefficient to generate a consistent time series across countries from 1958 to 2015. For the imputation, we use a recently developed PCA based approach which shows an excellent fit to the latest data on income distributions. We also present another version of this dataset which is 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 cross- country income inequality when aggregating to the regional level. This dataset will enable more robust analysis of the income distribution at multiple scales.