Elephant curve
Topic: Poverty and Inequality: Measurement and Policy · NCERT: Beyond NCERT
Meaning
The elephant curve (Lakner and Milanovic, 2016) is a graph of global income growth by percentile, covering 1988 to 2008. Each point shows how much the incomes of one slice of the world's population grew, from the poorest to the richest. The curve is shaped like an elephant:
- The raised back shows big gains for the emerging middle classes of Asia.
- The dip at the trunk shows that the lower-middle classes of rich countries stagnated.
- The raised tip of the trunk shows big gains for the global top 1%.
Example
Middle-income households in China and India saw large income gains over 1988–2008. So did the richest 1% worldwide. Over the same period, factory workers in rich Western countries saw little growth. This helps explain political discontent in those countries.
Don't confuse with
- Kuznets curve (1955): an inverted U that links inequality within one country to its per capita income over time. The elephant curve shows global income growth across percentiles over one period.