Measuring the Spatial Dimension of Regional Inequality: An Approach Based on the Gini Correlation Measure

Domenica Panzera () and Paolo Postiglione ()
Additional contact information
Domenica Panzera: “G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2020, vol. 148, issue 2, No 2, 379-394

Abstract: Abstract Traditional inequality measures fail to capture the geographical distribution of income. The failure to consider such distribution implies that, holding income constant, different spatial patterns provide the same inequality measure. This property is referred to as anonymity and presents an interesting question about the relationship between inequality and space. Particularly, spatial dependence could play an important role in shaping the geographical distribution of income and could be usefully incorporated into inequality measures. Following this idea, this paper introduces a new measure that facilitates the assessment of the relative contribution of spatial patterns to overall inequality. The proposed index is based on the Gini correlation measure and accounts for both inequality and spatial autocorrelation. Unlike most of the spatially based income inequality measures proposed in the literature, our index introduces regional importance weighting in the analysis, thereby differentiating the regional contributions to overall inequality. Starting with the proposed measure, a spatial decomposition of the Gini index of inequality for weighted data is also derived. This decomposition permits the identification of the actual extent of regional disparities and the understanding of the interdependences among regional economies. The proposed measure is illustrated by an empirical analysis focused on Italian provinces.

Keywords: Inequality measure; Spatial patterns; Spatial autocorrelation; Inequality decomposition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 C18 R1 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11205-019-02208-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
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:spr:soinre:v:148:y:2020:i:2:d:10.1007_s11205-019-02208-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-019-02208-7

Access Statistics for this article

Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement is currently edited by Filomena Maggino

More articles in Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().