The Concept and Measurement of Group Inequality

The economist’s conceptualisation of inequality in terms of interpersonal distribution of income or wealth, and the tradition of measurement of inequality that follows from this conceptualisation have not paid adequate attention to the need for reckoning inequality across social groups. In this paper they show that certain simple statistical tools to analyse categorical data can be shown to have properties that conform to our normative judgement on group inequality. [Working Paper No. 315]