IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/inq/inqwps/ecineq2011-203.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Gini index,the dual decomposition of aggregation functions, and the consistent measurement of inequality

Author

Listed:
  • Oihana Aristondo

    (Universidad del País Vasco)

  • José Luis García-Lapresta

    (Universidad Valladolid)

  • Casilda Lasso de la Vega

    (Universidad del País Vasco)

  • Ricardo Alberto Marques Pereira

    (Universita degli Studi di Trento)

Abstract

In several economic fields, such as those related to health, education or poverty, the individuals’ characteristics are measured by bounded variables. Accordingly, these characteristics may be indistinctly represented by achievements or shortfalls. A difficulty arises when inequality needs to be assessed. One may focus either on achievements or on shortfalls but the respective inequality rankings may lead to contradictory results. Specifically, this paper concentrates on the poverty measure proposed by Sen. According to this measure the inequality among the poor is captured by the Gini index. However, the rankings obtained by the Gini index applied to either the achievements or the shortfalls do not coincide in general. To overcome this drawback, we show that an OWA operator is underlying in the definition of the Sen measure. The dual decomposition of the OWA operators into a self-dual core and anti-self-dual remainder allows us to propose an inequality component which measures consistently the achievement and shortfall inequality among the poor.

Suggested Citation

  • Oihana Aristondo & José Luis García-Lapresta & Casilda Lasso de la Vega & Ricardo Alberto Marques Pereira, 2011. "The Gini index,the dual decomposition of aggregation functions, and the consistent measurement of inequality," Working Papers 203, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    • Handle: RePEc:inq:inqwps:ecineq2011-203
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2011-203.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Foster, James & Greer, Joel & Thorbecke, Erik, 1984. "A Class of Decomposable Poverty Measures," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 52(3), pages 761-766, May.
    2. repec:bla:scandj:v:81:y:1979:i:2:p:285-307 is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Dominique Thon, 1979. "On Measuring Poverty," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 25(4), pages 429-439, December.
    4. Maes, Koen C. & Saminger, Susanne & De Baets, Bernard, 2007. "Representation and construction of self-dual aggregation operators," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 177(1), pages 472-487, February.
    5. Oihana Aristondo & Casilda Lasso De La Vega & Ana Urrutia, 2010. "A New Multiplicative Decomposition For The Foster–Greer–Thorbecke Poverty Indices," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 62(3), pages 259-267, July.
    6. Satya R. Chakravarty, 2009. "Inequality, Polarization and Poverty," Economic Studies in Inequality, Social Exclusion, and Well-Being, Springer, number 978-0-387-79253-8, November.
    7. Kuan Xu & Lars Osberg, 2002. "The social welfare implications, decomposability, and geometry of the Sen family of poverty indices," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 35(1), pages 138-152, February.
    8. repec:bla:revinw:v:25:y:1979:i:4:p:429-39 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. Lars Osberg & Kuan Xu, 2000. "International Comparisons of Poverty Intensity: Index Decomposition and Bootstrap Inference," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 35(1), pages 51-81.
    10. Shorrocks, Anthony F, 1995. "Revisiting the Sen Poverty Index," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 63(5), pages 1225-1230, September.
    11. Garcia-Lapresta, Jose Luis & Llamazares, Bonifacio, 2001. "Majority decisions based on difference of votes," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 463-481, June.
    12. Clarke, Philip M. & Gerdtham, Ulf-G. & Johannesson, Magnus & Bingefors, Kerstin & Smith, Len, 2002. "On the measurement of relative and absolute income-related health inequality," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 55(11), pages 1923-1928, December.
    13. Michel Grabisch & Jean-Luc Marichal & Radko Mesiar & Endre Pap, 2009. "Aggregation functions," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) halshs-00445120, HAL.
    14. Sen, Amartya K, 1976. "Poverty: An Ordinal Approach to Measurement," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 44(2), pages 219-231, March.
    15. Clark, Stephen & Hemming, Richard & Ulph, David, 1981. "On Indices for the Measurement of Poverty," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 91(362), pages 515-526, June.
    16. Takayama, Noriyuki, 1979. "Poverty, Income Inequality, and Their Measures: Professor Sen's Axiomatic Approach Reconsidered," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 47(3), pages 747-759, May.
    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. Roy Cerqueti & Marcel Ausloos, 2015. "Statistical assessment of regional wealth inequalities: the Italian case," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 49(6), pages 2307-2323, November.
    2. Oihana Aristondo & JosŽ Luis Garc’a-Lapresta & Casilda Lasso de la Vega & Ricardo Alberto Marques Pereira, 2012. "Classical inequality indices, welfare functions, and the dual decomposition," DISA Working Papers 2012/06, Department of Computer and Management Sciences, University of Trento, Italy, revised Jun 2012.
    3. Roy Cerqueti & Marcel Ausloos, 2014. "Assessing the Inequalities of Wealth in Regions: the Italian Case," Papers 1410.4922, arXiv.org.
    4. Silvia Bortot & Ricardo Alberto Marques Pereira, 2013. "The binomial Gini inequality indices and the binomial decomposition of welfare functions," Working Papers 305, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.

    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. Oihana Aristondo & Francisco J. Goerlich Gisbert & Casilda Lasso De La Vega, 2015. "A Proposal to Compare Consistently the Inequality Among the Poor," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 61(3), pages 561-572, September.
    2. Jean–Yves Duclos & Phillipe Grégoire, 2002. "Absolute and Relative Deprivation and the Measurement of Poverty," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 48(4), pages 471-492, December.
    3. Ottó Hajdu, 2021. "A New Generalized Variance Approach for Measuring Multidimensional Inequality and Poverty," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 158(3), pages 839-861, December.
    4. Wen-Hao Chen & Jean-Yves Duclos, 2011. "Testing for poverty dominance: an application to Canada," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 44(3), pages 781-803, August.
    5. Michal Brzezinski, 2011. "Accounting for recent trends in absolute poverty in Poland: a decomposition analysis," Post-Communist Economies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 24(4), pages 465-475, December.
    6. Suman Seth, Sabina Alkire, 2014. "Measuring and Decomposing Inequality among the Multidimensionally Poor Using Ordinal Data: A Counting Approach," OPHI Working Papers 68, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford.
    7. Chakravarty, Satya R. & Deutsch, Joseph & Silber, Jacques, 2008. "On the Watts Multidimensional Poverty Index and its Decomposition," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 36(6), pages 1067-1077, June.
    8. Bibi, Sami & Duclos, Jean-Yves, 2007. "Equity and policy effectiveness with imperfect targeting," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 83(1), pages 109-140, May.
    9. Lars Osberg & Kuan Xu, 1999. "Poverty Intensity: How Well Do Canadian Provinces Compare?," Canadian Public Policy, University of Toronto Press, vol. 25(2), pages 179-195, June.
    10. Makdissi, Paul & Groleau, Yves, 2002. "Que pouvons-nous apprendre des profils de pauvreté canadiens?," L'Actualité Economique, Société Canadienne de Science Economique, vol. 78(2), pages 257-286, Juin.
    11. Suman Seth & Gaston Yalonetzky, 2021. "Assessing Deprivation with an Ordinal Variable: Theory and Application to Sanitation Deprivation in Bangladesh," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 35(3), pages 793-811.
    12. James Foster & Joel Greer & Erik Thorbecke, 2010. "The Foster–Greer–Thorbecke (FGT) poverty measures: 25 years later," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 8(4), pages 491-524, December.
    13. Francisco J. Ciocchini & Gabriel Molteni, 2008. "Medidas alternativas de la pobreza en el Gran Buenos Aires, 1995-2006," Ensayos de Política Económica, Departamento de Investigación Francisco Valsecchi, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas, Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina., vol. 1(2), pages 46-82, Octubre.
    14. Zheng, Buhong, 2000. "Minimum Distribution-Sensitivity, Poverty Aversion, and Poverty Orderings," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 95(1), pages 116-137, November.
    15. James E. Foster & Joel Greer & Erik Thorbecke, 2010. "The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) Poverty Measures: Twenty-Five Years Later," Working Papers 2010-14, The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy.
    16. Sreenivasan Subramanian, 2004. "Indicators of Inequality and Poverty," WIDER Working Paper Series RP2004-25, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    17. Kuan Xu & Ian Irvine, 2002. "Crime, Punishment and the Measurement of Poverty in the United States, 1979-1997," LIS Working papers 333, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg.
    18. Sabina Alkire and James Foster, 2016. "Dimensional and Distributional Contributions to Multidimensional Poverty," OPHI Working Papers ophiwp100_2.pdf, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford.
    19. Zelinsky, Tomas, 2014. "Chudoba a deprivácia na Slovensku: Metodologické aspekty a empíria [Poverty and Deprivation in Slovakia: Methodological Aspects and Empirics]," MPRA Paper 76868, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    20. Russell Davidson & Jean-Yves Duclos, 2000. "Statistical Inference for Stochastic Dominance and for the Measurement of Poverty and Inequality," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 68(6), pages 1435-1464, November.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Aggregation functions; dual decomposition; OWA operators; Gini index; consistent measures of achievement/shortfall inequality; Sen index; poverty measures.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C02 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - General - - - Mathematical Economics
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty

    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:inq:inqwps:ecineq2011-203. 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: Maria Ana Lugo (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ecineea.html .

    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.