Thomas Piketty

Money Moves

Professor at Paris School of Economics

For two centuries, global inequality moved in one direction: up. The gap between the world's richest and poorest countries widened from 1820 until the 1980s, when it began falling for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. The global Gini coefficient dropped from 70 points in 1990 to 62 points by 2019—a decline driven almost entirely by rapid income growth in China, India, and other populous developing nations.

Updated Jan 22