To Each the Same and to Each his Own: A Proposal to Measure Responsibility-Sensitive Income Inequality

This paper deals with the question of how to incorporate modern responsibility-catering egalitarianism into economic theory on the measurement of income inequality. I present a particular axiomatic expression of the main aspects of such egalitarianism. Then, to measure offensive inequality separately I construct a norm or reference income distribution based upon the axiomatic model to replace the perfectly equal income distribution that is used as norm by all common inequality measures. I defend the use of a particular measure of distributional change to determine the degree of offensive inequality, and apply the method to Belgian income data. Copyright (c) The London School of Economics and Political Science 2007.