Income Share Held by Lowest 20% 2005

Report year 2005·Data year 2005

Share of national income held by the poorest fifth (%)·Higher is better — rank 1 leads·Published by World Bank Group

21 reference years (2002–2022), covering 69 to 93 countries, from the World Bank’s own Poverty and Inequality Platform via its indicator API (SI.DST.FRST.20). How much of all the income in a country goes to its poorest fifth of people. Perfect equality would put 20% here and no country reaches it; the observed range runs from under 2% to about 11%. ⚠ IT MEASURES DISTRIBUTION, NOT POVERTY. A poor country that shares its income evenly scores well, and a rich unequal one badly, so it belongs beside the poverty headcount rather than instead of it. ⚠ THE COUNTRY SET CHANGES EVERY YEAR — survey-driven, the same caveat as the Gini index and the poverty headcount, which come from the same platform. ⚠ The Bank publishes no rank, so none is stored; the POSITION shown on the statistics page is derived here by ordering the score, and is labelled as ours. Opted in 2026-09-10, once PIP’s full precision made the ordering clean: no more than THREE countries share a value in any of the 21 editions (3.7% of the field at its worst), where the Bank’s one-decimal copy tied five and collapsed 73 economies onto 44 distinct values. Read from the Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP), not its indicator API: the API rounds to one decimal. The quintile is summed from PIP’s first two decile shares, which is exactly what it is. Re-sourced 2026-09-09. ⚠ Nineteen countries ran an income AND a consumption survey in the same year; only one can be an edition row, and the two differ by up to 8 index points. The choice is not made here — it is read out of the Bank’s own published figure for that country-year (income in 83 cases, consumption in 5).

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