Inequality in death from social conflicts: A Gini & Kolkata indices-based study

Antika Sinha and Bikas K. Chakrabarti

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2019, vol. 527, issue C

Abstract: Human deaths caused by individual man-made conflicts (e.g., wars, armed-conflicts, terrorist-attacks etc.) occur unequally across the events (conflicts) and such inequality (in deaths) have been studied here using Lorenz curve and values of the inequality indices Gini (g) and Kolkata (k) have been estimated from it. The data are taken from various well-known databases maintained by some Universities and Peace Research Institutes. The inequality measures for man-made conflicts are found to have very high values (g=0.82±0.02, k=0.84±0.02), which is rarely seen in economic (income or wealth) inequality measures across the world (g≤0.4, k≤0.6; presumably because of various welfare measures). We also investigated the inequalities in human deaths from natural disasters (like earthquakes, floods, etc.). Interestingly, we observe that the social inequality measures (g and k values) from man-made conflicts compare well with those of academic centers (inequality in citations; found in earlier studies) of different institutions of the world, while those for natural disasters can be even higher. We discuss about the ‘similarity classes’ of social inequality (similar higher values of g and k indices) for man-made competitive societies like academic institutions and man-made social conflicts, and connect our observations with that of the growing recent trend of economic inequality across the world (with rapid disappearance of welfare strategies).

Keywords: Gini index; Kolkata index; Economic inequality; Citation inequality; Welfare measures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:527:y:2019:i:c:s0378437119307162

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2019.121185

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