Multidimensional polarization for ordinal data

Martyna Kobus

No 326, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

Abstract: Western governments increasingly place more emphasis on non-income dimensions in measuring national well-being (e.g. the UK, France). Not only averages, but the characteristics of the whole distribution (e.g. inequalities) are taken into consideration. Commonly used data such as life satisfaction, declared health status or level of education, however, are ordinal in nature and the fundamental problem of measuring inequality with ordinal variables exists. Here, a class of multidimensional inequality indices for ordinal data is characterized by inequality axioms and based on the characterization theorem an inequality measure is proposed. The method ensures that the index is also attribute decomposable, that is, we can estimate the contribution to overall inequality from inequality in dimensions and from their association. It was found for the period 1972-2010 in the US, excluding 1985 that inequality in perceived happiness contributed more to overall inequality than health inequality. Joint inequality in health and happiness was significantly higher in the first half of the study period (0.3 vs. 0.2). In the 1970s and 1980s most healthy people were also happier and this positive association increased inequality by around 20 percent. This trend was reversed in the late 1980s when the contribution of association became negative. This trend for the healthiest to no longer be the happiest persisted with the exception of three years.

Keywords: Multidimensional inequality; ordinal data; copula function. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D3 D6 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2014-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2014-326.pdf (application/pdf)

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:inq:inqwps:ecineq2014-326

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maria Ana Lugo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).