The Lab works in close coordination with a large international network of researchers (over one hundred researchers covering nearly seventy countries) contributing to the database, in a collaborative effort to extend the existing database, which provides data on both distribution of income and wealth, "as well as the distribution of different forms of capital assets, in the analyzed countries".
[2] The first WID, which was placed in an open source repository in September of 2013, was compiled by Facundo Alvaredo, Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman.
"[3] From 2016 to 2017, through a 2015 Centers for Equitable Growth (CEG), Piketty, Saez, and Zucman studied Distributional National Accounts (DINA) for the United States.
WID, also referred to as WID.world, is an open source database, that is part of an international collaborative effort of over a hundred researchers in five continents.
[9] It was coordinated by economic and inequality experts Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman over four years.
"[13][11]: 10, 16 The Times article also noted that, "China's strategy based on low-skill manufacturing for export, and underpinned by aggressive investment in infrastructure, has proven more effective at raising living standards for the bottom half of the population than India's more inward-looking strategy, which has limited the benefits of globalization to the well-educated elite.
"[13] Tetlow of the Financial Times described inequality as the "defining characteristic of the age" as The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
"[11]: 123 Quartz cited the report, "[S]ince 1980 the top 0.1% have captured as much income growth as the entire bottom half of world's (adult) population.
"[16] In Capital is Back,[24] University of California at Berkeley's[25] French economist Gabriel Zucman and Thomas Piketty investigate the evolution of aggregate wealth-to-income ratios in the top eight developed economies, reaching back as far as 1700 in the case of the U.S., U.K., Germany, and France, and find that wealth-income ratios have risen from about "200-300% in 1970 to 400-600% in 2010",[26][24] levels unknown since the 18th and 19th centuries.