Reinterpreting between-group inequality

By C. Elbers, Peter Lanjouw, J. Mistiaen, Berk Özler. 2008

126 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We evaluate observed inequality between population groups against a benchmark of the maximum between-group inequality attainable given the number and relative sizes of those groups under examination. Because our measure is normalized by these parameters, drawing comparisons across different settings is less problematic than with conventional inequality decompositions. Moreover, our measure can decline with finer sub-partitioning of population groups. Consequently, the exact manner in which one groups the population acquires greater significance. Survey data from various countries suggest that our approach can provide a complementary perspective on the question of whether (and how much) a particular population breakdown is salient to an assessment of inequality in a country.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bbd6a6aeb6ccd42e33581d38a0ea42129d782a29

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In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Inequality of Educational Opportunity in India: Changes Over Time and Across States (2012, methodology): “6 Ferreira and Gignoux (2008) normalize between-group inequality using a conceptually appealing method devised by Elbers et al. (2008).”
A dissimilarity index of multidimensional inequality of opportunity (2010, background): “Similarly Elbers et al. (2008) have applied new re…nements on the decomposition of inequality indices to tracking changes in between-group inequality in several countries.”
Describing and decomposing post-apartheid income inequality in South Africa (2012, methodology): “Total inequality can be thought of as ‘the between-group inequality that would be observed if every [individual] in the population constituted a separate group’ (Elbers et al., 2008).”
Non-farm diversification, poverty, economic mobility and income inequality : a case study in village India (2013, methodology): “The evidence points to a clear turnaround with the Elbers et al (2008) statistic registering a significant decline between 1983/4 and 2008/9, from 50% to 29%.”
Measuring inequality of opportunity with imperfect data: the case of Turkey (2010, methodology): “An alternative decomposition, proposed by Elbers et al. (2008), adjusts the reference inequality (the denominator) to take into account the number and relative sizes of groups in the partition.”