Global Database of Shared Prosperity

The World Bank Group’s goal of promoting shared prosperity has been defined as fostering income growth of the bottom 40 per cent of the welfare distribution in every country, and is measured by annualized growth in average real per capita consumption or income of the bottom 40 per cent. At the outset, other details for constructing this indicator were left for countries to decide, resulting in a lack of comparability between countries if they chose different time-periods or databases when making their estimates.

In response to the rising demand for cross-country comparisons, the World Bank Group established a process for measuring shared prosperity in an internationally comparable way, addressing issues such as the choice of time period and the selection of databases for computing the indicator in order to produce numbers that would be relatively comparable across countries. 

As a result of these efforts, the World Bank Group has developed the Global Database of Shared Prosperity—a collection of comparable shared prosperity data from 90 countries circa 2012-2017 (available in .pdf and .xlsx). 

Methodology and Usage

The Global Database of Shared Prosperity (GDSP) includes the most recent figures on annualized consumption or income growth of the bottom 40 per cent and related indicators for 91 countries, which are roughly comparable in terms of time period and interval. All numbers were vetted by an internal Technical Working Group, using the methodology described here. 

Survey years are selected with the aim (i) to match the time periods as closely as possible across all countries, while including the most recent data; and (ii) to ensure the widest possible coverage of countries, across regions and income levels. While we recommend that this database be used for cross-country comparisons and benchmarking, colleagues should feel free to make their own decisions on the choice of surveys/years for computations of shared prosperity when cross-country comparison is not a consideration.

When looking at a particular country's context, it is also important to consider a wider range of indicators that relate to shared prosperity, going beyond the World Bank indicator of consumption or income growth of the bottom 40 per cent, for a richer and more contextual analysis.

The Team

The Global Database on Shared Prosperity, circa 2007 - 2012 was created by the Global Poverty Working Group (GPWG), an interdisciplinary technical working group established to improve the quality and frequency of poverty and inequality data, comprising members from the Poverty and Equity Global Practice and the Development Economics Vice Presidency (DEC) Research Group and Data Group. 

Contacts

Database and Methodology:

Nobuo Yoshida, Lead Economist at nyoshida@worldbank.org
Minh Cong Nguyen, Economist at mnguyen3@worldbank.org and
Jose Montes, Data Scientist at jmontes@worldbank.org

Media inquiries:

Elizabeth Howton, Communications Lead at ehowton@worldbankgroup.org