We examine the problem of measuring the extent to which students with different income levels attend separate schools. Unless rich and poor attend the same schools in the same proportions, some segregation will exist. Since income is a continuous cardinal variable, however, the rich-poor...

This paper presents and characterizes a two-parameter class of inequality measures that contains thegeneralized entropy measures, the variance of logarithms, the path independent measures of Foster and Shneyerov (1999) and several new classes of measures. The key axiom is a generalized form of...

Equal access to education is a basic human right. But in many countries gaps in education between various groups are staggering. An education Gini index - a new indicator for the distribution of human capital and welfare - facilitates comparison of education inequality across countries and over...

This chapter reviews definitional issues that arise in assessing the extent of, and change in, poverty in western industrialized countries, including the choice of resource, level of poverty line and appropriate adjustments for the size and type of the income-sharing unit. The chapter also...

In this paper, we apply the first-order dominance (FOD) approach to assessing multidimensional welfare to analyse multidimensional poverty in Zambia in 1996, 2006, and 2010. In addition to evaluating welfare across time and space, we extend the methodology to evaluate welfare by rural...

Per capita GDP has limited use as a well-being indicator because it does not capture many dimensions that imply a "good life," such as health and equality of opportunity. However, per capita GDP has the virtues of easy interpretation and can be calculated with manageable data requirements....

The purpose of this study is twofold. The first is to develop a new composite index of globalization based on data on 158 economies over the period 2006−2014. The second intention is to use the new index to evaluate empirically the possible effects of globalization on economic growth and...

It is well known that people’s consumption patterns change with income. Relative price changes therefore affect rich and poor consumers differently. Yet, the standard price indices are not income-specific and hence, the use of these mask these differences in cost-of-living. In this paper, we...

This paper investigates how inequality affects what the poor consider necessary to purchase. Using detailed information on the consumption choices of a large sample of poor households in India, we first provide evidence that inequality tends to make luxuries more necessary to the poor (their...

Why does inequality vary across societies? We advance the hypothesis that in a market economy, where earning differentials reflect variations in productive traits among individuals, a significant component of the differences in inequality across societies can be attributed to variation in...