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UNU-WIDER launches new WIID Explorer: a powerful tool for accessing and analysing data on income inequality

The World Income Inequality Database (WIID), hosted and maintained by UNU-WIDER for more than 20 years, is now accessible via a new WIID Explorer. The WIID Explorer is a powerful tool for accessing and analysing the most comprehensive collection of income inequality statistics in the world.

The development of the WIID Explorer has been in progress as a part of the WIID project for more than a year. Today marks its first deployment to the public sphere and is a landmark moment for the WIID itself. The WIID Explorer represents UNU-WIDER’s efforts to greatly improve the ways in which our inequality data can be mobilized, enabling non-expert users and experts alike to better understand income inequality statistics, conduct independent analysis, and create and share compelling graphs, charts, and tables.

The WIID Explorer allows users to create and display data visualizations by accessing the WIID Companion datasets in real time. Users can explore inequality data by country, region, or world and over time by years selected, while creating compelling charts or tables of their data selection. Users can create, share, or download a wide range of charts, figures, and tables with the tool, including more advanced visual displays of quantitative information like the global growth incidence curve (the famous ‘Elephant Curve’) and the decomposition of Global Gini into between- and within-country components.

The WIID Explorer also produces inequality factsheets on demand, for the world, major regions, and individual countries.

The latest version of the WIID (30 June 2022) includes inequality data on 201 countries (including historical entities) through 2021 with more than 3,820 unique country-year observations. This data is standardized for cross-country and over-time comparison in the WIID Companion datasets, introduced in 2021.

The WIID Companion reports complete income distributions at the country, region, and world level, with interpolations and extrapolations introduced to create comparable country-level inequality series, inequality indices, and country and global income distributions for the longest periods possible.

Users of the WIID Explorer are encouraged to share and publish charts created with the WIID Explorer, with attribution and citation of the database version. UNU-WIDER encourages Open Access and considers the databases it hosts to be important public goods.

Media enquiries for more information about the WIID Explorer, or about publishing charts for commercial use, can be directed to UNU-WIDER Editor and Communications Associate Timothy Shipp.