Polarization indices presented up to now have only focused their attention on the distribution of income/wealth. However, in many circumstances income is not the only relevant dimension that might be the cause of social conflict, so it is very important to have a social polarization index able...

The measurement of social polarization has received little attention from the literature. The only social polarization index that has been used to measure religious or ethnic polarization (the RQ index) has several shortcomings that are critically discussed in the paper. In particular, that...

A new class of multidimensional indices is axiomatically characterized to assess countries’ overall success in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). For that purpose we distinguish between the notions of progress and success functions. While the former basically measure changes...

In this article, we explore the impacts that education expansion and increased levels in educational homogamy have had on couples’ isolated illiteracy rates, defined as the proportion of illiterates in union that are married to an illiterate partner. First, we develop the methodology to...

This study critically reviews the Gender Inequality Index (GII), the new gender-related index proposed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in the 2010 <italic>Human Development Report</italic>, arguing that its particular construction limits its usefulness and appropriateness as a global gender...

The Human Development Index (HDI) has been criticized for not incorporating distributional issues. We propose using census data to construct a municipal-based HDI that allows exploring the distribution of human development with unprecedented geographical coverage and detail. Moreover, we present...

In the context of multidimensional poverty measurement, it seems plausible to assume that when individuals are deprived in some dimensions and non-deprived in the remaining ones, the latter can be allowed to play a non-trivial role in the assessment of those individuals' poverty levels. Yet,...

This study critically investigates the suitability of United Nations’ composite indices and other related measures—among which the Gender Inequality Index just released in 2010—to capture gender inequalities in the context of “highly developed” countries, focusing on the case of...