IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/jid/journl/y1999v08i1p1-1.html

Inequality Within and Among Nations

Author

Listed:
  • Michael C. Lovell

Abstract

This paper looks at both within and among country inequality utilizing data for the 82 countries for which comparable data are available from the 1996 World Development Report. In the spirit of Dalton (1920) and Atkinson (1970), this paper reports estimates for the welfare loss arising from inequality. The paper also explores the implications of Duesenberry style interdependent utility functions and evaluates the appropriateness of the Gini coefficient as a possible measure of "relative deprivation". In 18% of the pairwise comparisons of inequality in different countries, the situation is ambigious in the sense that neither country Lorenz dominates the other (Shorrocks, 1982). Generalized Lorenz curves leave ambigious 16% of paired welfare comparisons. The data generated a surprisingly stable empirical result: for any utility functrion satisfying Dalton's Principle of Proportionality of Transfers, the loss of welfare rising from within country inequality is approximately 40% of the loss caused by inequality among nations.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael C. Lovell, 1999. "Inequality Within and Among Nations," Journal of Income Distribution, Ad libros publications inc., vol. 8(1), pages 1-1, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:jid:journl:y:1999:v:08:i:1:p:1-1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://jid.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jid/article/view/7216
    Download Restriction: Some fulltext downloads are only available to subscribers. See JID website for details.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Gertrudes das Dores Lopes Saúde Guerreiro, 2012. "Regional Income Distribution in Portugal," CEFAGE-UE Working Papers 2012_06, University of Evora, CEFAGE-UE (Portugal).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • P5 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Comparative Economic Systems

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jid:journl:y:1999:v:08:i:1:p:1-1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Timm Boenke The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Timm Boenke to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gyorkca.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.