Measuring Significance of Inequalities with Heterogeneous Groups and Income Sources

The aim of this paper is threefold. First, we propose a bidimensional decomposition of the Gini ratio that combines two decomposition techniques of inequality measurement in a bivariate distribution context. Usually decomposed measures of inequality are gauged to be significant or not, using non-stratified bootstrap techniques. Second, we show, with an illustrative example on the Italian survey on household’s income and wealth, that the stratified bootstrap yields less distortion in estimated parameters. Finally, a brief review of the well-known confidence intervals follows.