Rankings of income distributions: a note on intermediate inequality indices

Coral del Rio Otero and Olga Alonso-Villar

A chapter in Inequality and Opportunity: Papers from the Second ECINEQ Society Meeting, 2008, pp 213-229 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of several intermediate inequality measures, paying special attention to the unit-consistency axiom proposed by Zheng (2007). First, we demonstrate why one of the most referenced intermediate indices, proposed by Bossert and Pfingsten (1990), is not unit-consistent. Second, we explain why the invariance criterion proposed by Del Río and Ruiz-Castillo (2000), recently generalized by Del Río and Alonso-Villar (2008), leads instead to inequality measures that are unaffected by the currency unit. Third, we show that the intermediate measures proposed by Kolm (1976) may also violate unit-consistency. Finally, we reflect on the concept of intermediateness behind the above notions together with that proposed by Krtscha (1994). Special attention is paid to the geometric interpretations of our results.

Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.101 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.101 ... 1049-2585(08)16010-0
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.101 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
Working Paper: Rankings of Income Distributions: A Note on Intermediate Inequality Indices (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:reinzz:s1049-2585(08)16010-0

DOI: 10.1016/S1049-2585(08)16010-0

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Research on Economic Inequality from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().