Abstract
It is common practice to summarize income or wealth inequality in a population by computing statistical inequality measures like the Gini Coefficient or the Coefficient of Variation. This should be complemented, however, by an analysis of the structure of inequality and an attempt to identify its sources. For this purpose it may be useful to partition the basic population into subpopulations by some socio-economic characteristics (such as employment type, education etc.) and to decompose overall inequality into a part which is due to inequality “within” subgroups and a part which is due to inequality “between” subgroups. This approach was successfully applied to the analysis of income inequality in England, the U.S.A. and France by Mookherjee and Shorrocks (1982), Cowell (1984), and Bourguignon and Morrisson (1985), respectively.
Acknowledgement: I am most grateful to Mark Trede for valuable research assistance. Thanks are also due to Josef Gastwirth and to two anonymous referees.
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© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin · Heidelberg
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Schmid, F. (1994). Decomposition of Inequality Measures. In: Eichhorn, W. (eds) Models and Measurement of Welfare and Inequality. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-79037-9_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-79037-9_10
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