Normative Inequality Indices

Antonio Villar

Chapter Chapter 4 in Lectures on Inequality, Poverty and Welfare, 2017, pp 57-71 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This chapter describes the standard approach to normative inequality measurement. The key idea is to interpret inequality as a welfare loss, when social welfare is measured by a conventional social welfare function. We focus on the of Atkinson family of inequality indices, which extends the initial ideas of Dalton by applying some of the notions that are common in expected utility theory. Atkinson uses the notion of equally distributed equivalent income to evaluate the actual distribution and to assess the size of the welfare loss. Those inequality indices are derived from a utilitarian social welfare function applied to individuals with identical cardinal utility functions. Atkinson generates a family of indicators that depend on a single parameter, to be understood as a measure of inequality aversion.

Keywords: Utility Function; Social Welfare; Income Distribution; Marginal Utility; Social Welfare Function (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:lnechp:978-3-319-45562-4_4

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319455624

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45562-4_4

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().