Measuring polarization via poverty and affluence

Christoph Scheicher

No 3/08, Discussion Papers in Econometrics and Statistics from University of Cologne, Institute of Econometrics and Statistics

Abstract: The decline of the middle class has been investigated as a principal aspect of social polarization (Wolfson 1994, 1997). Wang and Tsui 2000 have characterized a class of polarization measures by postulates on normalization, increasing spread and increasing bipolarity. The present paper generalizes this class of measures. It defines polarization by aggregating measures of poverty and of affluence, focussing on incomes outside a middle class interval. The approach is applied to German data on income distribution.

Keywords: decline of middle class; income distribution; income richness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/44945/1/65625467X.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:zbw:ucdpse:308

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers in Econometrics and Statistics from University of Cologne, Institute of Econometrics and Statistics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().