Abstract
Inequality and its analysis have received increasing attention in the literature over the last decades, which has led to the development of a large number of inequality measurement methodologies. In the analysis of inequality, results rely heavily on the choice of a measurement methodology and, very often, different methodologies do not lead to the same rankings. Therefore, in the assessment of inequality, the choice of an appropriate measure is crucial. Important as this choice may be, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there exists no research on the development of a systematic and unified framework for the selection of an adequate inequality measure depending on the context. In consideration of the foregoing, this paper provides a framework with practical guidelines for researchers and practitioners to facilitate the task of choosing the most appropriate inequality measure for their specific needs. The proposed guidelines are based on seven main properties of inequality indexes and are preceded by a comprehensive review of the different methods developed so far, focusing specifically on the advantages and drawbacks of each. Besides, they are accompanied by an empirical application of the different methodologies reviewed in order to better illustrate the various properties of the different inequality measures.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and comments, which led to an improved version of this paper. Irene Josa was supported by the Catalan Government through the grant of Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR), with reference number 2018 FI_B 00655. Besides, the authors are also grateful to Mon Culleré for his valuable insights into the topic and to Nirvan Makoond for proof reading.
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Appendix
Appendix
Table 2 shows how countries have been grouped according to the indicator “mean years of schooling”. The value of 15 has been chosen as the maximum as it is considered the projected maximum of the indicator for 2025 (United Nations 2018). The number of countries in each group is also shown for 6 years for illustrative purposes.
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Josa, I., Aguado, A. Measuring Unidimensional Inequality: Practical Framework for the Choice of an Appropriate Measure. Soc Indic Res 149, 541–570 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02268-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02268-0