The Countries with the Most/Least Income Inequality

You’ve heard statistics about how 10 percent of America owns 75 percent of the wealth and that the top 1 percent makes nearly 20 percent of all income. But is American prosperity really so unequal compared to the rest of the world?

In order to see how America stacks up against other nations, FindTheData turned to the Gini ratio. Developed by sociologist Corrado Gini in the early 20th century, the Gini ratio describes a country’s income distribution on a scale of zero to one. A Gini ratio of zero indicates that every person in the country makes exactly the same amount of money. A Gini ratio of one means that just one person makes all the money.

The United States' ratio? 0.41. Proportionally, this means the top 20 percent of earners make about 46 percent of the total national income.

While that might sound fairly unequal, America is actually near the middle of the pack compared to the rest of the world. Among the 88 countries we analyzed, the average Gini ratio was 0.38. For comparison, consider that Brazil’s Gini ratio is 0.53, where the top 20 percent make 57.2 percent of the wealth. South Africa’s Gini ratio is even higher, at 0.65   {USE Your Cursor Over Map}