ABSTRACT
Motivation The decade of the nineties witnessed the revival of empirical growth literature, which brought with it a renewed interest in question of the world distribution of income. Treating the world economy as a closed unit, there are number of methods proposed in the literature to estimate the distribution of world income - ranging from calculating per capita GDP of individual countries (Quah, 1996), Jones (1997), or calculating population-weighted GDP per capita taking into account the within-country income disparities (Bourguigon and Morrisson, 2002) to integrating individual country density functions to construct the world income distribution (Sala-i-Martin, 2002). In another interesting study, an attempt has been made to decompose the total inequality between the individuals in the world, by continents and regions (Milanovic, 2002).
