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Christoph Lakner

Christoph Lakner works in the Poverty Global Practice of the World Bank. He holds an MPhil in Economics and a BA in Economics & Management from the University of Oxford, where he is also completing a DPhil in Economics. His research interests include inequality, poverty, and labour markets in developing countries. In particular, he has been working on global inequality, the relationship between inequality of opportunity and growth, implications of regional price differences for inequality, and the income composition of top incomes.

By this expert

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

Paper Conference paper | By Branko Milanovic and Christoph Lakner | Apr 2015

The paper presents a newly compiled and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. In 2008, the global Gini index is around 70.5 percent having declined by approximately 2 Gini points over this twenty year period. When it is adjusted for the likely under-reporting of top incomes in surveys by using the gap between national accounts consumption and survey means in combination with a Pareto-type imputation of the upper tail, the estimate is a much higher global Gini of almost 76 percent.