Benchmark
Some Countries Have Become Less Unequal
Income inequality has declined in a handful of countries in the Asia-Pacific region
A woman pushes her bicycle past a market in a garment manufacturing district in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Will Baxter/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
The gap between the rich and the poor has been growing across the world. But there is a handful of countries in the Asia-Pacific region where it has decreased, and it isn't just the Piketty effect.
The population-weighted mean Gini coefficient for the entire region rose from 33.5 to 37.5 between the 1990s and 2014, with income inequality particularly wide in the biggest developing countries, including China, India and Indonesia.