Narrowing Inequality?

From Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell

The World Bank, among others, has produced statistics showing that the ratio between the incomes of the 20 highest income countries and the 20 lowest income countireshas grown over the period from 1960-2000, rising from about 23-to-one to about 36-to-one. Some have used such data to claim, among other things, that globalization increases the economic inequality between prosperous and poverty-stricken nations. But the directly opposite conclusion would be reached when comparing the same set of nations in 2000 as in 1960. The income ration between the initially richest 20 nations and the initially poorest 20 declined from 23-to-one to less than ten-to-one. Freer and rising amounts of international trade – globalization – was in fact one of the reasons why some nations rose out of the bottom 20.