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World Income Inequality Database - WIID
The World Income Inequality Database (WIID) presents information on income inequality for developed, developing, and transition countries. It provides the most comprehensive set of income inequality statistics available and can be downloaded for free.
This page hosts the latest version of WIID, but also the WIID Companion datasets which report standardized WIID data to create more comparable country level inequality series, inequality indices, and complete country and global income distributions for the longest periods possible.
Latest version of WIID
WIID provides the most comprehensive set of income inequality statistics available
With this *current WIID version, the observations now reach the year 2021 and covers 201 countries (including historical entities) with over 22,000 data points in total. There are now more than 3,800 unique country-year observations in the database. Read more about the observation composition here.
*These database files have been updated on 21 October 2022 to correct a minor error affecting the GDP data. The first uncorrected release is still available on the previous versions page.
| Excel | Stata | User guide | Revision note |
|---|---|---|---|
| WIID_30JUN2022_0.xlsx |
 WIID_30JUN2022_0.zip |
 WIID User Guide |
WIID Version Note |
Please cite this database version as UNU-WIDER, World Income Inequality Database (WIID). Version 30 June 2022. https://doi.org/10.35188/UNU-WIDER/WIID-300622
The WIID Companion
The WIID Companion reports annual country and global per capita income distributions at the percentile level.
Along the main dataset, UNU-WIDER provides a WIID Companion, which consists of two companion datasets. One of these reports inequality data by country and the other reports inequality data globally, including the global distribution.
These datasets offer a more user-friendly, curated set of inequality statistics with most of the necessary data selection and adjustment needed to analyse, describe, or compare levels of inequality between countries or over time has already been taken care of by our inequality and data experts.
| Excel | Stata | User guide | Revision note |
|---|---|---|---|
 wiidcountry.xlsx |
wiidcountry.zip |
User Guide |
Version Note |
|
wiidglobal.xlsx |
wiidglobal.zip |
The WIID Companion reports annual country and global per capita income distributions at the percentile level. It also includes a set of measures that summarize the distribution, including relative and absolute inequality indices and various income share ratios. Thus, the WIID Companion represents trends in the income distribution within countries, between countries, and globally to improve the study of income inequalities and contribute to better monitoring of inequality trends.
Resources are available with detailed information on how to use the WIID Companion datasets. There are also three WIDER Technical Notes describing construction of the WIID Companion datasets. For more advanced users, we also provide a Stata file package which can be used to replicate the steps taken in the construction of the WIID Companion.
Please cite this database as UNU-WIDER, World Income Inequality Database (WIID) Companion dataset (wiidcountry and/or wiidglobal). Version 30 June 2022. https://doi.org/10.35188/UNU-WIDER/WIIDcomp-300622
Resources
User Guide
Technical Note: Data Selection
Technical Note: Standardized Series
Technical Note: Global Income Distribution
Contact the WIID team
Please contact the WIID team for any questions about the database. We also encourage comments on this version and contributions of updated data points. The database will be regularly updated. Notifications and details about updates will continue to be given on this website. Some minor corrections may be done without a change in the database version.