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More Equal and Poorer, or Richer but More Unequal?

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  • Greselin Francesca

    (Department of Statistics and Quantitative Methods, Milano-Bicocca University, Via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi 8, 20126 Milano, Italy)

Abstract
After a hundred years of contributions, the debate about how to measure inequality is still open. We provide a brief review of the literature, showing that inequality has been assessed through a relative approach, from Gini's pioneering article [Atti del Reale Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti 73 (1914), no. 2, 1203–1248]. Analyzing historical census data for Flint and other American cities, we observe how mean values of income in population subgroups capture the shape of the distributions of income and their comparisons state the overall situation of inequality. Namely, we adopted the approach introduced in [Statistica & Applicazioni 5 (2007), no. 1, 3–27] to assess inequality. Our first findings show that prosperity is distributed unevenly across America's metropolitan areas. More interestingly, unbalanced wealth can be related to other concomitant facts [The New Geography of Jobs, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2012], such as population growth, income growth, unemployment rates and women participation to the labor force. Gaps between more and less educated areas were modest 40 years ago, but they have become quite large nowadays [Cities and skills, technical report, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1994].

Suggested Citation

  • Greselin Francesca, 2014. "More Equal and Poorer, or Richer but More Unequal?," Stochastics and Quality Control, De Gruyter, vol. 29(2), pages 99-117, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:bpj:ecqcon:v:29:y:2014:i:2:p:99-117:n:3
    DOI: 10.1515/eqc-2014-0011
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Youri Davydov & Francesca Greselin, 2020. "Comparisons Between Poorest and Richest to Measure Inequality," Sociological Methods & Research, , vol. 49(2), pages 526-561, May.
    2. Francesca Greselin & Ričardas Zitikis, 2018. "From the Classical Gini Index of Income Inequality to a New Zenga-Type Relative Measure of Risk: A Modeller’s Perspective," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 6(1), pages 1-20, January.
    3. Amparo Ba'illo & Javier C'arcamo & Carlos Mora-Corral, 2021. "Extremal points of Lorenz curves and applications to inequality analysis," Papers 2103.03286, arXiv.org.
    4. Greselin, Francesca & Zitikis, Ricardas, 2015. "Measuring economic inequality and risk: a unifying approach based on personal gambles, societal preferences and references," MPRA Paper 65892, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Francesca Greselin & Alina Jȩdrzejczak, 2020. "Analyzing the Gender Gap in Poland and Italy, and by Regions," International Advances in Economic Research, Springer;International Atlantic Economic Society, vol. 26(4), pages 433-447, November.

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