ON INTERMEDIATE MEASURES OF INEQUALITY

Buhong Zheng

A chapter in Studies on Economic Well-Being: Essays in the Honor of John P. Formby, 2004, pp 135-157 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract: This paper examines the notion of intermediate inequality and its measurement. Specifically, we investigate whether the intermediateness of an intermediate measure can be preserved through repeated (affine) inequality-neutral income transformation. For all existent intermediate measures of inequality, we show that the intermediateness cannot be preserved through the transformation; each intermediate measure tends to either a relative measure or an absolute measure. This observation is then generalized to the class of unit-consistent inequality measures. An inequality measure is unit-consistent if inequality rankings by the measure are not affected by the measuring units in which incomes are expressed. We show that the unit-consistent class of intermediate measure of inequality consists of generalizations of an existent intermediate measure and, hence, the intermediateness also cannot be retained in the limit through transformations.

Keywords: Intermediate measure of inequality; Relative inequality; Absolute inequality; Inequality measurement; Income transformation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
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 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:eme:reinzz:s1049-2585(04)12005-x

DOI: 10.1016/S1049-2585(04)12005-X

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 ().