‘Williamson’s Fallacy’ in Estimation of Inter-Regional Inequality

Konstantin Gluschenko

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: While estimating regional inequality, many economists use inequality indices weighted by regions’ shares in the national population. Despite this approach is widespread, its adequacy has not received attention in the regional science literature. This paper proves that such approach is conceptually inconsistent, yielding an estimate of interpersonal inequality among the whole population of the country rather than an estimate of regional inequality. Moreover, the population-weighted inequality indices do not meet requirements to an adequate inequality measure.

Keywords: Inequality index; Weighting by population; Williamson coefficient of variation; inequality axioms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 R10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-11-20, Revised 2016-05-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-pr~
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/71075/9/MPRA_paper_71075.pdf original version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/75534/1/MPRA_paper_75534.pdf revised version (application/pdf)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/79411/1/MPRA_paper_79411.pdf revised version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: ‘Williamson’s Fallacy’ in Estimation of Inter-Regional Inequality (2015)
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:pra:mprapa:71075

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().