September 06, 2013
But it's not all bad news. Milanovic notes that most countries, particularly at the lower and middle sections of the income breakdown, have seen income growth between 1988 and 2008. Those in the upper-middle have stagnated--the so-called "middle income trap"--and those at the very bottom haven't done great, but it's overall a quite positive picture.
And as Laurence Chandy at Brookings and Charles Kenny at the Center for Global Development have noted, this has translated into a remarkable decline in global poverty, one that's on track to continue in decades to come.