Path independent multiplicatively decomposable inequality measures

Foster and Shneyerov (2000) explore an additive decomposition property for inequality measures that they call path independent decomposition. They characterise the class of measures that have this property. Taking their results as a reference, we seek here to generalise the notion of decomposability, and to characterise inequality measures that admit path independent multiplicative decomposition. It is shown that all the measures in this family can be generated on the basis of Atkinson’s index for value 1 of the inequality aversion parameter. (Copyright: Fundación SEPI)