 Interpreting inequality measures and changes in inequalityNew Zealand Economic Papers, 2016, vol. 50, issue 2, 177-192 Abstract: This paper explores, in the context of the Atkinson inequality measure, attempts to make interpretations of orders of magnitude transparent. One suggestion is that the analogy of sharing a cake among a very small number of people provides a useful intuitive description for people who want some idea of what an inequality measure ‘actually means’. In contrast with the Gini measure, for which a simple ‘cake-sharing’ result is available, the Atkinson measure requires a nonlinear equation to be solved. Comparisons of ‘excess shares’ (the share obtained by the richer person in excess of the arithmetic mean) for a range of assumptions are provided. The implications for the ‘leaky bucket’ experiments are also examined. An additional approach is to obtain the ‘pivotal income’, above which a small increase for any individual increases inequality. The properties of this measure for the Atkinson index are also explored. Date: 2016 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:nzecpp:v:50:y:2016:i:2:p:177-192 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/00779954.2015.1045929 Access Statistics for this article New Zealand Economic Papers is currently edited by Dennis Wesselbaum More articles in New Zealand Economic Papers from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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