We provide a parsimonious axiomatisation of the complete class of absolute inequality indices. Our approach uses only a weak form of decomposability and does not require a priori that the measures be differentiable.

This paper presents a multidimensional normative framework to evaluate whether the world moved forward between 1980 and 2008. We focus on the robustness of the results when attributing different weights to the different dimensions. Population-weighted international welfare has not worsened over...