@article{vanderMensbrugghe:332567,
      recid = {332567},
      author = {van der Mensbrugghe, Dominique},
      title = {Shared Socio-economic pathways and global income  distribution},
      address = {2015},
      pages = {25},
      year = {2015},
      note = {Presented at the 18th Annual Conference on Global Economic  Analysis, Melbourne, Australia},
      abstract = {New socio-economic pathways have been developed in the  context of ongoing work for the Intergovernmental Panel on  Climate Change (IPCC), starting with the Fifth Assessment  Report (AR5). Economists, part of the Integrated Assessment  Modeling Consortium (IAMC) and linked to the IPCC process,  have been developing so-called shared socio-economic  pathways (or SSPs) that are designed to span the spectrum  of potential outcomes for the global economy along two  broad axes—relating to the challenges of adaptation and  mitigation respectively. Part of the storyline of the SSPs  relates to relative developments of per capita incomes,  i.e. different assumptions about processes of income  convergence and divergence. To date, most of the analysis  on income distribution has focused on the across country  distribution of global GDP. The main purpose of this paper  is to combine the across country analysis with within  country assumptions about income distribution and to assess  the implications for global and regional income  distribution when populations are merged into larger  entities. A focus on across country analysis provides a  distorted picture of what the current distribution is and  how it may evolve. Even in the most optimistic growth  scenario, the degree of improvement in the Gini  coefficient, one measure of global income distribution, is  not nearly so great when taking into consideration within  country distribution. This paper provides some insight into  global income distribution taking into account differential  macro growth rates as well as the changing within-country  distribution. The main drivers—GDP and population—are taken  from the publicly available database for the five SSP  scenarios. The base distribution information is sourced  from the World Bank’s Povcal website for developing  countries and from the OECD for the OECD countries. The  available country distributional data is used to calibrate  parameterized distribution functions (e.g. log-normal).  These latter are projected forward in time with assumptions  about their evolution consistent with an interpretation of  the SSP storylines. The parameterized distribution  functions are then used to construct artificial household  distributions for each country. These latter are then  pooled in different regional aggregations, including a  world aggregation, to assess implications for regional and  global income distribution.},
      url = {http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/332567},
}