From the global inequality files.

Post-communist countries still tend to have lower inequality than expected based on their income (post-Comm=red; LatAm=green; West=blue).

Saying that transfers from rich to poor countries are transfers from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries is SO wrong.

Virtually everybody in Mali and Uganda is poorer than the even the poorest Dutch, let alone the median taxpayer in the Netherlands.

But transferring money from the Netherlands to Italy is an altogether different proposition. The poor Italians are indeed poorer than the poor Dutch, but the gap steadily diminishes as you go higher in the distribution, and at the top it vanishes.

Forces underlying migration are huge.

If you are at the 20th percentile of the Moroccan distribution, move to France & end up at the 20th percentile of the French distribution, you will have jumped ahead of almost 3 billion people: 40th to 80th global percentile (vertical axis)

Even more so if you move from the 20th percentile in Mexico to the 20th percentile in the US.

But note that at the very top, richest Mexicans like richest Moroccans hold their own quite well against the richest French and richest Americans.

Urban China is catching up pretty well with America, especially so at the top. But the gap at the median is still large.

But what holds for urban China does not hold for rural China. In fact China is almost two different countries. At the median, the gap between an urban and a rural Chinese is 20 percent of world population (ranked by income), i.e. about 1.5 billion people.

In India, the gap between the urban and rural population is less than in China--but this is in part because there are equally poor people in both rural and urban areas, and also equally rich people in both.