The Gini coefficient measures income or wealth inequality within a population on a scale from 0, representing perfect equality where every individual or household has an identical income, to 1 (or equivalently 100 on a 0-100 scale), representing perfect inequality where a single individual or household holds all of the income. Developed by Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1912 and derived mathematically from the Lorenz curve plotting cumulative income share against cumulative population share, it is the most widely used single-number summary of inequality, calculated for individual countries by national statistical agencies and compiled comparatively across countries by the World Bank and other international bodies, though it is commonly criticized for compressing a complex income distribution into one number that can obscure very different underlying distributions.
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