World Income, Inequality and Murder

Michael Höhle

We follow up on last weeks post on using Gapminder data to study the world’s income distribution. In order to assess the inequality of the distribution we compute the Gini coefficient for the world’s income distribution by Monte Carlo approximation and visualize the result as a time series. Furthermore, we animate the association between Gini coefficient and homicide rate per country using the new version of gganimate.

Introduction

One of the main messages of the Chapter ‘The Gap Instinct’ of the book Factfulness is that there is no justification of the ‘we’ and ‘them’ classification of countries anymore, because ‘they’ have converged towards the same levels in key indicators such as life expectancy, child mortality, births per female. The difference between countries is, hence, not as many imagine it to be: there is less inequality and no real gap. While reading, I became curious about the following: what if countries became more equal, but simultaneously inequality within countries became bigger? This was also indirectly a Disqus comment by F. Weidemann to the post Factfulness: Building Gapminder Income Mountains. Aim of the present post is to investigate this hypothesis using the Gapminder data by calculating Gini coefficients. Furthermore, we use the country specific Gini coefficients to investigate the association with the number of homicides in the country.

Leer más: http://staff.math.su.se/hoehle/blog/2018/07/09/gini.html