A Note on Gary Fields' Index of Income Inequality

This paper is an assessment of the approach suggested by Gary Fields for measuring inequality in an economy with high-income sector enlargement. This approach describes the change in inequality according to a U-pattern, instead of the inverted U-pattern described by other indices. We argue that Fields index is not consistent with Lorenz Dominant Criterion (LDC) because of its failure to adequately describe the distributive change due to rank preserving transfers. The properties of Fields' index and of the modified version of the index F2, the behaviour, the originality and the limits of this approach in inequality measurement are tested and briefly discussed.