Computing the Gini index: A note

Edward Furman, Yisub Kye and Jianxi Su

Economics Letters, 2019, vol. 185, issue C

Abstract: The Gini index of inequality has been extensively studied by economists in a variety of contexts with the notions of wealth and income distribution serving as two primary examples. Nevertheless, the Gini index is by far less popular outside of the economics literature, and even in economics it is not uncommon to replace Gini with other measures of inequality. A reason for this lies in the critics associated with the computability of the Gini index. In this note, we reveal convenient ways to compute the Gini index explicitly and in some cases effortlessly. The thrust of our approach is the herein discovered link between the Gini index and the notion of statistical sample size-bias. Not only the just-mentioned link opens up advantageous computational routes for the Gini index, but also yields an alternative interpretation for it.

Keywords: Gini index; Size-bias; Fox-H distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C46 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:185:y:2019:i:c:s0165176519303787

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2019.108753

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