Inequality measures are often presented in the form of a rank ordering to highlight their relative magnitudes. However, a rank ordering may produce misleading inference, because the inequality measures themselves are statistical estimators with different standard errors, and because a rank...

In this paper, we show that standard measures used in the income inequality literature, the Lorenz curve and the associated Gini-index, can successfully be applied to the distribution of defence spending across countries. Secondly, we use the Samuelson rule to explain the distribution of...