At its core, the Gini coefficient (or Gini Index) is a country’s inequality score, as developed by Italian statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini.
Instead of just looking at how rich a nation is overall (like GDP does), the Gini index tells you how that wealth is actually divided among the people living there. It is the metric that proves whether a country’s economic growth is benefiting everyone, or just a few elites at the top.
Here is the simple scale it uses:
- 0 (Perfect Equality): Everyone in the country has the exact same amount of wealth or income. (This doesn’t exist in reality).
- 1 or 100 (Absolute Inequality): One single person holds 100% of the country’s wealth, and everyone else has nothing.