This paper emphasizes the properties of a family of inequality measures which extends the Atkinson indices and is axiomatically characterized by a multiplicative decomposition property where the withingroup component is a generalized weighted mean with weights summing exactly to 1. This family contains canonical forms of all aggregative inequality measures, each bounded above by 1, has a useful and intuitive geometric interpretation and provides an alternative dominance criterion for ordering distributions in terms of inequality. Taking the Spanish Household Budget Surveys (HBS) for 1973/74, 1980/81, and 1990/91 and the more recent Continuous HBS for 2003, we show the advantages and possibilities of this extended family in regard to completing and detailing information in studies of inequality focussing on the tails of the distribution and on the changes in the distribution when the population is partitioned into population subgroups.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number
16256.
Length: Date of creation: 2009 Date of revision:
2009 Publication status: Published in Journal of Income Distribution 1.18(2009): pp. 20-41 Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:16256
Find related papers by JEL classification: D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: