This intermediate case can be interpreted as covering incomes in the “lower-middle class”, defined as households with incomes above the poverty threshold but below the median income. General means as income standards (cont.) Strong emphasis on the bottom of the distribution: this case (a = -8, income of the poor) is empirically generally close to the mean income of the poor, where the latter are defined in relative terms with a threshold set between 50 and 60% of median income. First, inspection of income standard curves delivers a broad assessment of inequality rankings across countries, which will be consistent with that implied by most widely used summary inequality measures such as the Gini coefficient. This evaluation is illustrated in Figure 1 for selected pairs of OECD countries, in each case exhibiting similar levels of average household incomes in 2010 (i.e. the income standard curves cross at pj).