Income percentile for world population

Sorry but your clarification actually made things more confusing.

Do you want to enter a person's income and then find out that income as a percentile of the entire world's income?

I am concerned that your methodology is flawed. The problem is that to get a percentile for a specific income, you have to have either raw data giving the income of every individual on the planet, or some sort of digested set of percentiles. All you have is average income for a lot of countries, with no data for how that income is distributed. For example, the U.S. is one of the largest countries on the list but its income distribution is skewed to the right. The mean (which is the figure you have) may not be the same as the median (which is the boundary for the 50th percentile). For example, let's take an extreme example of an income of $120,000. It looks like the only country with an income that high is Qatar so you would say that person's income is at a very high percentile. But in reality many countries have people with incomes that high but your data gives us no idea how many. So there is no way to know the real percentile.

You can do a rough approximation based on your data but it assumes that income is equally distributed in all countries, which we know is not true.

See attached. I added Sheet1 to demonstrate. I had to add population to "Per Capita Income" to be able to do this. Your income figures were entered as text so I had to convert them to numbers to be able to do any calculations.

Originally Posted by commexjimmy

...when I input an income of $35,000, it calculates that as being in the top 4.6% of the world, not the 80.25% we are getting.

I don't have the ultimate answer for you but I do want to clarify one thing. The number I provide is the percentile, so that when you see 80.25% it means that this income is higher than 80.25% of the world's population. The web site you referred to gives an upside-down percentile; that is, if you are in the top x% of the world, you must subtract from 100% to get the percentile. So if you are in the top 4.6%, you are at the 95.4 percentile. Still, 80 is much different than 95.

A solution for this problem is very easy in Excel but the problem is getting the right data. I would not even know where to begin to get that data, but I would do the Excel part without being paid for it. If I come across something helpful I'll let you know.

Yes I see that and that is OK to use either figure. Either figure meaning 95.4% or 4.6%, for example. Not sure if this helps but here ya go https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

And thanks so much again for your time, it's a blessing!