Despite the formal rigour that attends social and economic measurement, the substantive meaning of particular measures could be compromised in the absence of a clear and coherent conceptualization of the phenomenon being measured. A case in point is afforded by the status of a "focus-axiom" in...

Two conversion schemes may be employed for assessing income inequality from household equivalent incomes: to weight household units by size or by needs. Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, we show the sensitivity of country inequality rankings to conversion schemes and explain the...

Assessments of whose income growth is the greatest and whose is the smallest are typically based on comparisons of income changes for income groups (e.g. rich versus poor) or income values (e.g. quantiles). However, income group and quantile composition changes over time because of income...

The decline of the middle class has been investigated as a principal aspect of social polarization (Wolfson 1994, 1997). Wang and Tsui 2000 have characterized a class of polarization measures by postulates on normalization, increasing spread and increasing bipolarity. The present paper...

Income-expenditure surveys typically provide incomes on the household level. As households can differ in size and needs, a reliable assessment of inequality in living standards, therefore, necessitates the conversion of the original heterogeneous into an artificial quasi-homogeneous population....

A recent trend in the study of poverty is to consider a relative poverty line, one that is responsive to the nature of the income distribution. We develop an axiomatic approach to the determination of an amalgam poverty line. Given a reference income (e.g. the mean or the median), the amalgam...

This paper shows how distance functions, a tool typically employed in production economics to measure the distance between a set of inputs and a set of outputs, can be employed to approximate a composite measure encompassing the many dimensions of well-being. It also illustrates how to implement...

This essay outlines the exact definition of “Equality” and “Inequality” in economics. The discussion moves forward to review concepts of ranking of orderings and methodology of constructing Indices of Inequality with an emphasis on Lorenz Orderings. We also discuss the possibility of...

The aim of this paper is to propose an axiomatic characterization of an aggregate measure of growth that takes into account the initial economic conditions of individuals, through their position in the initial income distribution. The contribution of our work to the existing literature is...

This paper examines the contribution of different income sources to overall income inequality in India, and how the relative importance of each income source has changed between 2004 and 2012. The paper finds that income inequality has increased marginally between 2004 and 2012. Most...