Recent studies attempt to quantify the extent to which income inequality is due to income components, such as earnings, investment income and transfer income. This paper examines the fundamental issues and problems involved in assigning inequality contributions to components. Different...

This paper considers a wide class of inequality indices and identifies those which are additively decomposable. The sub-class of mean independent, additively decomposable measures turns out to be a single parameter family which includes the squared coefficient of variation and the two Theil's...