The empirical relationship between income poverty and income inequality in rich and middle income countries

Eleni Karagiannaki

Published 21 November 2017

This research draws on inequality and poverty statistics from various databases including the European Union Statistics on Incomes and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), the OECD Income Distribution Database (IDD) and the World Wealth and Income Database (WID) to investigate the relationship between inequality and poverty in rich and middle income countries. The analysis is supplemented with detailed case studies for the UK, US, Sweden and Denmark (using in addition distributional statistics from national databases) in order to gain a better understanding of the driving forces behind the correlation between poverty and inequality trends.