IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bol/bodewp/wp1153.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Within-between decomposition of the Gini index: a novel proposal

Author

Listed:
  • Federico Attili

Abstract

The socioeconomic impact of spatial concentration has been receiving an increasing attention during the last two decades. Consequently, the necessity of effective measures of this phenomenon has increased too. This paper considers a population partitioned by subgroups and develops a decomposition of the Gini index in two components, which measure the within and the between group inequality and are also particularly effective to quantify spatial concentration. Indeed, they possess a crucial property which overcomes important issues that may arise using any Gini index decomposition in the spatial context, following a recent approach. In addition, the availability of an only-two highly informative components decomposition provides in numerous applications and several frameworks further significant advantages in the determination of the contributions to global inequality of the intra and the inter groups differences. The ability of the components to capture these phenomena is supported by a parametric bootstrap procedure. This highlights extremely high correlations between the components and two axiomatically derived benchmarks. The presentation of a case study concerning the income distribution in the Italian provinces concludes the works, the informativeness and the interpretative advantages of the proposed decomposition appear evidently.

Suggested Citation

  • Federico Attili, 2020. "Within-between decomposition of the Gini index: a novel proposal," Working Papers wp1153, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
  • Handle: RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp1153
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://amsacta.unibo.it/6497/1/WP1153.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lambert, Peter J & Aronson, J Richard, 1993. "Inequality Decomposition Analysis and the Gini Coefficient Revisited," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 103(420), pages 1221-1227, September.
    2. Shorrocks, Anthony F, 1984. "Inequality Decomposition by Population Subgroups," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 52(6), pages 1369-1385, November.
    3. Mookherjee, Dilip & Shorrocks, Anthony F, 1982. "A Decomposition Analysis of the Trend in UK Income Inequality," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 92(368), pages 886-902, December.
    4. Ellison, Glenn & Glaeser, Edward L, 1997. "Geographic Concentration in U.S. Manufacturing Industries: A Dartboard Approach," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(5), pages 889-927, October.
    5. Campante, Filipe & Do, Quoc-Anh, 2007. "Inequality, Redistribution, and Population," Working Paper Series rwp07-046, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    6. Patrick Kline & Enrico Moretti, 2014. "People, Places, and Public Policy: Some Simple Welfare Economics of Local Economic Development Programs," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 6(1), pages 629-662, August.
    7. Arbia, Giuseppe & Piras, Gianfranco, 2009. "A new class of spatial concentration measures," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 53(12), pages 4471-4481, October.
    8. Anthony Shorrocks & Guanghua Wan, 2005. "Spatial decomposition of inequality," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 5(1), pages 59-81, January.
    9. Shlomo Yitzhaki & Robert I. Lerman, 1991. "Income Stratification And Income Inequality," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 37(3), pages 313-329, September.
    10. Ebert, Udo, 1984. "Measures of distance between income distributions," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 32(2), pages 266-274, April.
    11. Frank Bickenbach & Eckhardt Bode, 2008. "Disproportionality Measures of Concentration, Specialization, and Localization," International Regional Science Review, , vol. 31(4), pages 359-388, October.
    12. Pyatt, Graham, 1976. "On the Interpretation and Disaggregation of Gini Coefficients," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 86(342), pages 243-255, June.
    13. Ripsy Bandourian & Robert Turley & James McDonald, 2002. "A Comparison of Parametric Models of Income Distribution across Countries and over Time," LIS Working papers 305, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg.
    14. Yitzhaki, Shlomo, 1994. "Economic distance and overlapping of distributions," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 61(1), pages 147-159, March.
    15. Dagum, Camilo, 1997. "A New Approach to the Decomposition of the Gini Income Inequality Ratio," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 22(4), pages 515-531.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Stéphane Mussard & Françoise Seyte & Michel Terraza, 2006. "La décomposition de l’indicateur de Gini en sous-groupes : une revue de la littérature," Cahiers de recherche 06-11, Departement d'économique de l'École de gestion à l'Université de Sherbrooke.
    2. Geoffrey Warner, 2001. "A lorenz curve based index of income stratification," The Review of Black Political Economy, Springer;National Economic Association, vol. 28(3), pages 41-57, December.
    3. Branko Milanovic, 2002. "True World Income Distribution, 1988 and 1993: First Calculation Based on Household Surveys Alone," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 112(476), pages 51-92, January.
    4. Jurkatis, Simon & Strehl, Wolfgang, 2014. "Gini decompositions and Gini elasticities: On measuring the importance of income sources and population subgroups for income inequality," Discussion Papers 2014/22, Free University Berlin, School of Business & Economics.
    5. Alina Jędrzejczak, 2014. "Income Inequality and Income Stratification in Poland," Statistics in Transition new series, Główny Urząd Statystyczny (Polska), vol. 15(2), pages 269-282, March.
    6. Allanson, Paul, 2014. "Income stratification and between-group inequality," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 124(2), pages 227-230.
    7. Magne Mogstad, 2007. "Measuring Income Inequality under Restricted Interpersonal Comparability," Discussion Papers 498, Statistics Norway, Research Department.
    8. Branko Milanovic & Shlomo Yitzhak, 2006. "Decomposing World Income Distribution: Does The World Have A Middle Class?," IBT Journal of Business Studies (JBS), Ilma University, Faculty of Management Science, vol. 2(2), pages 88-110.
    9. Jiandong Chen & Dai Dai & Ming Pu & Wenxuan Hou & Qiaobin Feng, 2010. "The trend of the Gini coefficient of China," Global Development Institute Working Paper Series 10910, GDI, The University of Manchester.
    10. Stéphane Mussard & Michel Terraza, 2009. "Décompositions des mesures d'inégalité : le cas des coefficients de Gini et d'entropie," Recherches économiques de Louvain, De Boeck Université, vol. 75(2), pages 151-181.
    11. Branko Milanovic & Shlomo Yitzhak, 2006. "Decomposing World Income Distribution : Doesthe World Have A Middle Class?," IBT Journal of Business Studies (JBS), Ilma University, Faculty of Management Science, vol. 2(2), pages 2-1.
    12. Rolf Aaberge & Steinar Bjerve & Kjell Doksum, 2005. "Decomposition of rank-dependent measures of inequality by subgroups," Metron - International Journal of Statistics, Dipartimento di Statistica, Probabilità e Statistiche Applicate - University of Rome, vol. 0(3), pages 493-503.
    13. Stéphane Mussard, 2005. "On Decomposition of the Gini Index of Equality," Cahiers de recherche 05-09, Departement d'économique de l'École de gestion à l'Université de Sherbrooke.
    14. Jørgen Modalsli, 2017. "Decomposing Global Inequality," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 63(3), pages 445-463, September.
    15. St鰨ane Mussard & Patrick Richard, 2012. "Linking Yitzhaki's and Dagum's Gini decompositions," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 44(23), pages 2997-3010, August.
    16. Simon Jurkatis, "undated". "Dos and Don'ts of Gini Decompositions," BDPEMS Working Papers 2013003, Berlin School of Economics.
    17. Shlomo Yitzhaki & Edna Schechtman, 2009. "The “melting pot”: A success story?," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 7(2), pages 137-151, June.
    18. Ihle, Dorothee & Siebert-Meyerhoff, Andrea, 2017. "The older, the richer? A decomposition of wealth inequality by age subgroups," CAWM Discussion Papers 97, University of Münster, Münster Center for Economic Policy (MEP).
    19. Masato Okamoto, 2009. "Decomposition of gini and multivariate gini indices," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 7(2), pages 153-177, June.
    20. Joachim R. Frick & Jan Goebel & Edna Schechtman & Gert G. Wagner & Shlomo Yitzhaki, 2006. "Using Analysis of Gini (ANOGI) for Detecting Whether Two Subsamples Represent the Same Universe," Sociological Methods & Research, , vol. 34(4), pages 427-468, May.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • O15 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
    • R10 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - General
    • R12 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography)

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:bol:bodewp:wp1153. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sebolit.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.