Inequality values as excess shares

Anthony Shorrocks

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Inequality research is handicapped by a lack of instruments to communicate the high level of prevailing inequality to the general public. This paper offers a promising solution to this shortcoming. Building on the classic cake-sharing framework yields not only a novel interpretation of the Gini coefficient as the excess share of the richest person in an n-way partition, but also a powerful way of portraying inequality levels in a diagram. This new inequality metric can also be applied to inequality measures other than the Gini, providing opportunities to resurrect indices which have fallen into disuse in recent years.

JEL-codes: D31 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2026-03
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:137849

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