The analysis of inequality is placed in the context of recent developments in economics and statistics.

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Measurement of inequality

What is inequality? In the late 1990s there was an explosion of interest in the subject that yielded a substantial body of formal tools and results for income-distribution analysis Nearly all of this is founded on a small set of core assumptions - such as the Principle of Transfers, scale independence, the population principleâˆ‘ - that are used to give meaning to specific concepts of inequality measurement, inequality ranking and, indeed, to inequality itself But does the standard axiomatic structure coincide with public perceptions of inequality? Or is the economist's concept of inequality a thing apart, perpetuated through serial brainwashing in the way the subject is studied and taught? In this 1999 book, Amiel and Cowell examine the evidence from a large international questionnaire experiment using student respondents Along with basic 'cake-sharing' issues, related questions involving social-welfare rankings, the relationship between inequality and overall income growth and the meaning of poverty comparisons are considered

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Thinking about inequality

Inequality means different things to different people: whether inequality should encapsulate ethical concepts such as the desirability of a particular system of rewards or simply mean differences in income is the subject of much debate. Here we will conceptualise inequality as the dispersion of a distribution, whether that be income, consumption or some other welfare indicator or attribute of a population.

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Inequality: Methods and Tools

This paper aims at equity implications of transportation policies by using a range of equity measures in two case studies. Different measures of inequality embrace different normative judgments. Early studies have warned about placing too much trust in a single measure. One approach is to address equity considerations by assuming an explicit form of social welfare function and the choice of a desired inequality aversion parameter. A second approach is to apply an inequality measure to a given pair of distributions of a variable (e.g., income and accessibility) that changes as the result of a policy. The latter approach is adopted in this paper. A partial equilibrium model of transportation is used for the calculation of the changes in income, accessibility, and the net benefit for different social groups. This paper demonstrates the challenges that arise in addressing equity with a partial equilibrium model of transportation. An overview of some equity measures and their properties is provided first. The ...

Equity Measures and Their Performance in Transportation

This paper is an empirical study of the acceptability of distributional axioms Data from five German universities were used to analyze attitudes with respect to the anonymity postulate, relative and absolute income inequality aversion (tests of the acceptability of scale and translation invariance), specific transfer affinities, and replication aversion (the population principle) This paper represents an innovation in the analysis of perception of distributional equality in that it offers more comprehensive and conclusive results as to the statistical consistency of test responses, introduces a test of the anonymity postulate and, finally, uses combinations of some of these responses to express more complex perceptions of income distributional inequalities in the form of inequality attitudes

Elizabeth Harrison

Papers

Acceptance of Distributional Axioms: Experimental Findings