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Measuring Inequality: The Axiomatic Approach

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Handbook of Income Inequality Measurement

Part of the book series: Recent Economic Thought Series ((RETH,volume 71))

Abstract

An index of inequality is a summary statistic of the dispersion of incomes. Indices of inequality are employed for evaluating a particular income distribution and for comparing different distributions. The typical questions addressed along these lines are: (i) How has inequality in region A changed over time ? (ii) Is inequality in region A greater than that in region B? (iii) Is the pre-tax income distribution more unequal than the post-tax distribution ? (iv) What are the major sources of inequality in region A? (v) Given any partitioning of the population, what are the contributions of “within-group” and “between-group” components of inequality?

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Authors
  1. Satya R. Chakravarty
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Bar-Ilan University, Israel

    Jacques Silber

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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Chakravarty, S.R. (1999). Measuring Inequality: The Axiomatic Approach. In: Silber, J. (eds) Handbook of Income Inequality Measurement. Recent Economic Thought Series, vol 71. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4413-1_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4413-1_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-010-5897-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-011-4413-1

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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