Also available online.

"Using a large cross-country income distribution detest spanning close to 800 country-year observations from industrial and developing Countries, the authors show that the size distribution of per capital income is well approximated empirically by a lognormal density. The null hypothesis that per capita income follows a lognormal distribution cannot be rejected when applied to per capital consumption. The authors show that lognormality of per capital income has important implications for the relative roles of income growth and inequality changes in poverty reduction. When poverty reductionists the overriding policy objective, poorer and relatively equal countries may be willing to tolerate model increases in come inequality in exchange for faster growth-more so than richer and highly unequal countries"-World Bank web site.

Includes bibliographical references.

Open access.