Exploring Income Inequality on Data Explorer

I use a large amount of Google's products and I consider a number of them quite useful and very well designed. However, I have a growing interest and competence in manipulation and rendition of data in ways that allow for the extraction of meaning and the Gapminder site has been a wonder for me. I cannot recall accurately but I have been aware of its acquisition by Google and so I was not surprised when Google's version of Public Data Explorer was launched.

The chart on this post represents my first use of this impressive facility. However, I am not merely intent on showing the discovery of a new toy but to see what that data illustrates. Based on 2005 data, all the BRICs seems to have a skewed distribution of income with the income share of the lowest 20% of the population being below 10%. I picked Bangladesh for the purposes of comparison and it is evident that in spite of the fact that it has the lowest per capita income levels and the smallest GDP, the bottom 20% of its population earns 9.3% of the total income.

Differences in income alone do not tell much but taken together with other socioeconomic and political factors, it is clear that for all the miracles of their growth, most of the BRICs will be developing nations for a while longer. That chart also reveals that for all its poverty, Asia exhibits lower levels of income disparity than South America.