The Elephant Curve

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The Elephant Curve, also called the Lakner-Milanovic graph, is a simple chart that shows how income growth since globalization has been shared by people in different global income groups. The original version, published in 2013, looks at growth from 1988 to 2008. The x-axis shows global income percentiles, and the y-axis shows the percent of income growth. The main finding is that the global top 1% gained about 60% in income, while the global middle saw about 70–80% growth.

The curve was created by Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic as part of a broader study called Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession. They built a database from national household surveys to compare income growth across countries and regions, and they produced growth incidence curves to illustrate how globalization affected different groups. The global curve came to be known as the Elephant Curve because its shape resembles a side view of an elephant.

In describing the shape, the bottom 10% starts low and rises steeply (the tail), the middle climbs (the torso), there’s a sharp bend around the 50–60% mark (the head), and the upper end rises again toward the 100% (the trunk). For reference, the graph also showed a horizontal line at about 24% to indicate the global mean growth rate during that period.

Four main conclusions about globalization and inequality from the original elephant curve are:
- The very poorest saw little benefit from globalization.
- The global middle—especially in developing countries like China and India—experienced strong growth.
- The global upper-middle class in richer countries saw little wage growth.
- The global top 1% enjoyed large gains, making them the “winners” of globalization.

In 2018, researchers updated the elephant curve using a different data source, the World Inequality Database, and expanded the period to 1980–2016. This version found that the top 1% grew about 101% and the top 0.001% about 235%, while the middle 40% grew about 43% and the top 10% about 70%. It also noted that the top 1% tended to gain roughly twice as much as the bottom 50%.

Context matters. Over the long run, inequality has fluctuated with economic and political changes. In some eras, reforms, taxes, unions, and education helped reduce inequality, while in others, policies and globalization raised it. The elephant curve helps visualize how wealth and growth can be shared very differently across the world, but it is not the whole story of inequality.

Two quick definitions to round things out:
- The Gini index is a common measure of inequality, ranging from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality).
- The Lorenz curve graphs the share of total income earned by the bottom part of the population, illustrating how evenly income is distributed.