All chaptersThe aim of the World Inequality Report 2026 is to present the latest and most comprehensive data on inequality in order to inform democratic debate worldwide. It updates the 2022 and 2018 editions, expanding both the temporal and thematic scope of our research. In addition to long-run series regarding income and wealth, this report deepens our analysis of redistribution, gender gaps, political divides, and the international financial system. It also advances our work on global tax justice, with new evidence on how progressive taxation could mobilize substantial resources to finance education, health, and climate adaptation.
Economic inequality has always been at the center of debates about how societies should be organized. The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of armed conflicts, the acceleration of climate change, and the extreme polarization of democracies make these debates even more urgent. How should the incomes and wealth produced by our economies be distributed across populations and across the globe? Are today’s fiscal systems adequate to meet collective needs? Are the poorest countries catching up with richer ones? Are women and marginalized groups acquiring equal access to opportunities? On these questions, people across the world hold strong and often contradictory views about what constitutes acceptable inequality and what should be done about it.
Our objective is not to claim that a single “ideal” level of inequality exists, nor to prescribe a single institutional model. Ultimately, such decisions can only be made through public deliberation and political institutions. Our more modest goal is to provide a common basis of facts. We hope to contribute to a shared understanding of how inequality has evolved, who benefits and who is left behind, and what policy tools are available to reduce the gaps.
The World Inequality Database (wid.world) remains central to this endeavor. Built over two decades of collaborative research involving more than two hundred scholars worldwide, wid.world provides open access to the most extensive data on the historical evolution of income and wealth distribution. By linking fiscal records, household surveys, national accounts, and new data on gender, elections, and global finance, it becomes possible to track several dimensions of inequality across countries, regions, and socioeconomic groups with an unprecedented level of detail.
Beyond wid.world, the World Inequality Lab (WIL) has also developed a range of complementary tools to broaden access to inequality data and strengthen democratic debate. These include new thematic databases such as the World Political Cleavages and Inequality Database (wpid.world), the World Historical Balance of Payments Database (wbop.world), the World Human Capital Expenditure Database (whce.world), and the Distribuciones website for Latin America (distribuciones.info), alongside updated methodological guidelines for Distributional National Accounts Guidelines (DINA Guidelines). The WIL has also produced the Climate Inequality Report 2025 and launched interactive platforms like the Global Wealth Tax Simulator, which allow policymakers, journalists, and citizens to visualize how progressive taxation could mobilize resources for collective goods. Looking ahead, the Global Justice Project will expand this effort by combining data on inequality, the environment, and social issues to envision fair and sustainable pathways for the 21st century. It will include a Global Justice Fund proposal with expenditure objectives to reduce inequality. Together, these tools reflect our commitment not only to documenting inequality but also to making data transparent, accessible, and usable by a wide audience.
In parallel with these initiatives, the global architecture for inequality monitoring is entering a new phase. The release of the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts Report on Global Inequality, led by Joseph E. Stiglitz, and joined by Adriana Abdenur, Winnie Byanyima, Jayati Ghosh, Imraan Valodia and Wanga Zembe-Mkabile, has put forward a landmark proposal to establish an International Panel on Inequality (IPI). The World Inequality Lab warmly welcomes this recommendation. The extreme concentration of wealth and power documented in both this report and ours underscores the need for an independent global body capable of systematically tracking inequality trends and evaluating the distributional impact of major policy choices. This work builds on, and can substantially scale up, the efforts we have developed for more than a decade through the World Inequality Database and our network of researchers worldwide. The World Inequality Lab stands ready to contribute its data, methods, and expertise to this emerging international architecture, which represents a historic opportunity to place tax justice, social justice, and inequality at the heart of global governance.
This World Inequality Report 2026 offers new findings in five main areas:
First, we provide updated and extended evidence on the scale and structure of global inequality. We show that income and wealth have reached historic highs but remain very unevenly distributed. For instance, the top 0.001%—fewer than 60,000 individuals—owns three times more wealth than the entire bottom half of humanity combined. This imbalance is compounded by regional disparities, as South & Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa lag far behind North America & Oceania and Europe. Within almost every region, the top 1% alone hold more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.
Second, the report updates our worldwide systematic measure of gender inequality, specifically female labor income shares, and provides a new methodology for measuring gender inequality that accounts for unpaid labor hours. Women still earn only around 30% of total global labor income, and in every region, they work more hours than men when unpaid labor is accounted for. The gender pay gap persists across all regions and is larger when unpaid labor hours are accounted for.
Third, we present new evidence on the structural privilege of the rich world in the international financial system. What was once described as the “exorbitant privilege” of the United States—borrowing cheaply thanks to the dollar’s reserve-currency role while investing abroad at higher returns—has expanded into a systemic advantage enjoyed by advanced economies as a group. These countries consistently record positive income inflows coming from poorer nations. This is not the product of market efficiency but of institutional design, rooted in currency dominance, portfolio asymmetries, and global financial rules that allow rich countries to operate as financial rentiers. The result is a modern form of unequal exchange: poorer nations transfer large shares of their GDP each year to wealthier ones, shrinking their fiscal capacity and limiting their ability to invest in essential services such as education, health, and infrastructure. Rather than correcting global imbalances, today’s international financial system entrenches them, locking developing countries into structural disadvantage.
Fourth, we analyze the role of progressive taxation and redistributive policies in reducing inequality. Taxes and transfers are among the most powerful tools societies have to finance public goods and reduce inequality. Progressive taxation also strengthens social cohesion and limits the political influence of extreme wealth. Yet evidence shows that tax progressivity collapses at the very top: centi-millionaires and billionaires often pay proportionally less tax than most of the population, undermining both fiscal capacity and trust.
Fifth, we analyze how inequality reshapes political cleavages and democratic representation. Evidence in this report shows that working-class representation in parliaments has long been low and has declined further in recent decades, narrowing the space for redistributive politics. In Western democracies, income and education political divides have disconnected, producing “multi-elite” party systems in which highly educated voters lean left and high-income voters remain aligned with the right. This fragmentation has weakened broad coalitions for redistribution. Geography has also re-emerged as a central divide, with rural and urban voters increasingly polarized, further fragmenting the working majority. More ambitious and inclusive policy platforms appear to be needed so as to rebuild the redistributive coalitions of the past.
This report also explores solutions. Evidence shows that inequality can be reduced through progressive taxation, redistributive transfers, investment in human capital, recognition of unpaid work, and reforms to global finance. For instance, even a moderate 3% global tax on fewer than 100,000 centi-millionaires and billionaires alone would raise over $750 billion annually, a figure comparable to total education budgets in low- and middle-income countries. Such proposals for global tax justice demonstrate that significant revenues could be mobilized from a tiny fraction of the population, while reinforcing fairness and restoring the legitimacy of fiscal systems.
We are acutely aware, however, of the limitations of our knowledge. Despite significant progress, many countries still fail to publish reliable income and wealth data. Some of the largest economies continue to withhold tax statistics, limiting transparency and informed debate. As in previous editions, we call on governments and international organizations to release more raw data on income, wealth, and taxation. The lack of transparency is not a technical issue alone; it undermines the very possibility of democratic deliberation about inequality and its remedies.
By providing detailed documentation of our data and methods we hope to fulfill our single most important objective: to enable interested citizens to make informed judgments about the inequalities that affect them in their everyday lives. Economic issues do not belong only to economists, policymakers, or business leaders. They belong to everyone. Our objective is to contribute to the power of the many by equipping societies with the facts needed to engage in informed, democratic debate about one of the most pressing issues of our time: inequality.
