IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ecolet/v185y2019ics0165176519303787.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Computing the Gini index: A note

Author

Listed:
  • Furman, Edward
  • Kye, Yisub
  • Su, Jianxi

Abstract

The Gini index of inequality has been extensively studied by economists in a variety of contexts with the notions of wealth and income distribution serving as two primary examples. Nevertheless, the Gini index is by far less popular outside of the economics literature, and even in economics it is not uncommon to replace Gini with other measures of inequality. A reason for this lies in the critics associated with the computability of the Gini index. In this note, we reveal convenient ways to compute the Gini index explicitly and in some cases effortlessly. The thrust of our approach is the herein discovered link between the Gini index and the notion of statistical sample size-bias. Not only the just-mentioned link opens up advantageous computational routes for the Gini index, but also yields an alternative interpretation for it.

Suggested Citation

  • Furman, Edward & Kye, Yisub & Su, Jianxi, 2019. "Computing the Gini index: A note," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 185(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:185:y:2019:i:c:s0165176519303787
    DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2019.108753
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176519303787
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.econlet.2019.108753?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. James B. McDonald, 2008. "Some Generalized Functions for the Size Distribution of Income," Economic Studies in Inequality, Social Exclusion, and Well-Being, in: Duangkamon Chotikapanich (ed.), Modeling Income Distributions and Lorenz Curves, chapter 3, pages 37-55, Springer.
    2. T. Pham-Gia & N. Turkkan, 2002. "The product and quotient of general beta distributions," Statistical Papers, Springer, vol. 43(4), pages 537-550, October.
    3. A. Mathai & R. Saxena, 1967. "On a generalized hypergeometric distribution," Metrika: International Journal for Theoretical and Applied Statistics, Springer, vol. 11(1), pages 127-132, December.
    4. Lerman, Robert I. & Yitzhaki, Shlomo, 1984. "A note on the calculation and interpretation of the Gini index," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 15(3-4), pages 363-368.
    5. Edward Furman & Ričardas Zitikis, 2009. "Weighted Pricing Functionals With Applications to Insurance," North American Actuarial Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 13(4), pages 483-496.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Zhang, Xiaoyu & Xu, Maochao & Su, Jianxi & Zhao, Peng, 2023. "Structural models for fog computing based internet of things architectures with insurance and risk management applications," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 305(3), pages 1273-1291.
    2. Battaïa, Olga & Guillaume, Romain & Krug, Zoé & Oloruntoba, Richard, 2023. "Environmental and social equity in network design of sustainable closed-loop supply chains," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 264(C).
    3. Ruijia Wu & Rafael Alvarado & Priscila Méndez & Brayan Tillaguango, 2024. "Impact of Informational and Cultural Globalization, R&D, and Urbanization on Inequality," Journal of the Knowledge Economy, Springer;Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), vol. 15(1), pages 1666-1702, March.
    4. Songpu Shang & Songhao Shang, 2021. "Estimating Gini Coefficient from Grouped Data Based on Shape-Preserving Cubic Hermite Interpolation of Lorenz Curve," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 9(20), pages 1-11, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Saralees Nadarajah, 2006. "Sums, products and ratios of generalized beta variables," Statistical Papers, Springer, vol. 47(1), pages 69-90, January.
    2. Dickens, Richard & Machin, Stephen & Manning, Alan, 1998. "Estimating the effect of minimum wages on employment from the distribution of wages: A critical view," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 5(2), pages 109-134, June.
    3. Quentin Wodon, 2000. "Microdeterminants of consumption, poverty, growth, and inequality in Bangladesh," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 32(10), pages 1337-1352.
    4. Schweri, Juerg & Hartog, Joop & Wolter, Stefan C., 2011. "Do students expect compensation for wage risk?," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 215-227, April.
    5. Yang Lu, 2019. "Flexible (panel) regression models for bivariate count–continuous data with an insurance application," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 182(4), pages 1503-1521, October.
    6. Timofeeva, Anastasiia, 2015. "On endogeneity of consumer expenditures in the estimation of households demand system," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 37(1), pages 87-106.
    7. Meya, Jasper N. & Drupp, Moritz A. & Hanley, Nick, 2021. "Testing structural benefit transfer: The role of income inequality," Resource and Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(C).
    8. Flachaire, Emmanuel & Nunez, Olivier, 2007. "Estimation of the income distribution and detection of subpopulations: An explanatory model," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 51(7), pages 3368-3380, April.
    9. Chotikapanich, Duangkamon & Griffiths, William E, 2002. "Estimating Lorenz Curves Using a Dirichlet Distribution," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 20(2), pages 290-295, April.
    10. José Lorenzo, 2002. "E-Index for measuring concentration," International Advances in Economic Research, Springer;International Atlantic Economic Society, vol. 8(4), pages 357-361, November.
    11. Abbring, Jaap H. & van den Berg, Gerard J., 2003. "A Simple Procedure for the Evaluation of Treatment Effects on Duration Variables," IZA Discussion Papers 810, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    12. Nantian Huang & Hua Peng & Guowei Cai & Jikai Chen, 2016. "Power Quality Disturbances Feature Selection and Recognition Using Optimal Multi-Resolution Fast S-Transform and CART Algorithm," Energies, MDPI, vol. 9(11), pages 1-21, November.
    13. D'Errico, Marco & Macchiarelli, Corrado & Serafini, Roberta, 2015. "Differently unequal: Zooming-in on the distributional dimensions of the crisis in euro area countries," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 93-115.
    14. Chotikapanich, Duangkamon & Griffiths, William E. & Rao, D.S. Prasada & Karunarathne, Wasana, 2014. "Income Distributions, Inequality, and Poverty in Asia, 1992–2010," ADBI Working Papers 468, Asian Development Bank Institute.
    15. Schluter, Christian & van Garderen, Kees Jan, 2009. "Edgeworth expansions and normalizing transforms for inequality measures," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 150(1), pages 16-29, May.
    16. van den Berg, Gerard J., 2007. "On the uniqueness of optimal prices set by monopolistic sellers," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 141(2), pages 482-491, December.
    17. Mathias Silva, 2023. "Parametric models of income distributions integrating misreporting and non-response mechanisms," AMSE Working Papers 2311, Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France.
    18. Vladimir Hlasny & Paolo Verme, 2022. "The Impact of Top Incomes Biases on the Measurement of Inequality in the United States," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 84(4), pages 749-788, August.
    19. Hajargasht, Gholamreza & Griffiths, William E., 2013. "Pareto–lognormal distributions: Inequality, poverty, and estimation from grouped income data," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 593-604.
    20. Denis Beninger & François Laisney, 2006. "On the performance of unitary models of household labor supply estimated on “collective” data with taxation," Cahiers d'Economie et Sociologie Rurales, INRA Department of Economics, vol. 81, pages 5-36.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Gini index; Size-bias; Fox-H distribution;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C46 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Specific Distributions
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:185:y:2019:i:c:s0165176519303787. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolet .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.