In recent years, various classes of indices measuring the improvement of well-being have been suggested. Formally, an improvement index is a function Q*(x1, x2), where xt is the level of some attribute of well-being, e.g., life expectancy, in period t. This paper extends previous works on...

This article characterizes all of the continuous social welfare orderings which satisfy the Weak (resp. Strong) Pareto principle when utilities are ratio-scale measurable. With Weak Pareto, on both the nonnegative and positive orthants the social welfare ordering must be representable by a...

This paper attempts to merge two strands of the literature on relative deprivation and generalized Gini indices by designing a new class of generalized Gini indices based on the concept of relative deprivation. In this connection, rank-dependent marginal deprivation functions are introduced. A...

This paper explores the forces that shaped China's interprovincial inequality in the last five decades of Communist rule. In so far as the change in interprovincial inequality is the result of differential growth in provincial GDP per capita and provincial economic growth, it may be decomposed...

This paper explores equivalent formulations of the polarization ordering first proposed by Foster and Wolfson. Motivated by the class of polarization indices proposed by Foster and Wolfson, we have developed a class of generalized Foster-Wolfson indices. In addition, a new class of polarization...