Search results

Measures of inequality determine the effectiveness of social and economic policies aimed at reducing inequality and to design effective intervention policies. The purpose of this paper is to focus on poverty reduction and welfare improving impacts of reducing income inequality in the case of Fiji. Using Fiji's Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2002‐2003, a comprehensive analysis is used to measure the level of inequality by household income, quintile income distribution, decomposition of inequality by ethnicity and regional groups, and the household income inequality by source of income.

Several statistical techniques have been applied to investigate the degree of inequality in the household income. These include the Gini coefficient, the Nelson ratio, the concentration index and the Atkinson index. An evaluation by ethnicity, regions and household income sources reflects the level of inequality, and concerns for policies and governance.

The results show that urban households, in particular, experience greater inequalities, in both positive and normative terms. The Indo‐Fijian households experience greater income inequalities than the Fijian households. Decomposition results for the separate factor income components also indicate major sources of inequality. These findings clearly establish that Fiji still has a long way to go in reducing the income gaps between the rich and the poor in both rural and urban households.

The paper is a first study that estimates various measures of inequality in the case of Fiji. The implication of the empirical findings suggests that Fiji is unlikely to achieve its Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty rate by 2015 due to the large income differentials by ethnicity and in the urban‐rural areas.

The purpose of this paper is to propose the application of Gini, Theil and concentration indices for measuring inequality in water usage.

Gini coefficients and Theil indices have been used to estimate the overall inequality in domestic water use in a sample of 30 countries around the world. Along with Theil’s L (unweighted) index, liters per capita per day and gross national income weighted Theil index have also been estimated. Theil indices have been further disintegrated into within- and between-group inequalities. Concentration curve is also constructed to study the inequality in water use in accordance to the countries’ economic standing.

Domestic water use is high among the well-off countries considered in the study. Also, the Theil indices indicate that between group inequality contributes more to the overall inequality. It is observed that Theil indices, which consider only per capita water usage and can be decomposed, give a better insight into the existing inequality.

Different approaches were used to quantify inequality. The choice of index depends on the context of the study. The proposed approaches can contribute to planning of sustainable water management and development policies.

There is a dearth of metrics for quantifying inequality in water access or use. The study presents the application of indices, widely used in quantifying inequality in access to other resources such as income and energy, in assessing water inequality.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between expenditure inequality and expenditure polarization in Indonesia during the post-reformation era in 2002–2012. It also explores the various dimensions of regional groups; and finds out in which dimension did the expenditure inequality and polarization occur in Indonesia during the period.

Gini index was employed to measure expenditure inequality and a number of developed polarization measurement was applied to investigate the linkage between inequality and polarization at national levels. It also applied a polarization index based on inequality decomposition to investigate how the polarization occurs in the regional dimension. It covered several groups of regional dimensions; those are rural and urban areas; eastern and western regions, as well as natural resource-rich provinces and non-natural resource-rich provinces.

This study found that expenditure inequality and polarization in Indonesia have moved in line, showing an increasing trend during the observation period. In the regional context, the greatest rise was in the region with low initial levels of expenditure inequality and polarization. The trends in each of the regional dimension showed a convergent pattern. It also showed that a significant portion of total polarization was attributed to expenditure differences between urban and rural areas rather than the other groups of regions.

The similar upward movement of expenditure inequality and polarization indicates that not only the differences between groups of expenditure are getting larger, but also the identification of the within groups expenditure are getting stronger. Since the high degree of inequality and polarization are closely related to conflict among groups of communities, this finding is a strong message to the policymaker that the development process in Indonesia during 2002–2012 tended to encourage the creation of social instability.

This study provides an evaluation for further development of social economy in Indonesia.

This paper attempts to give an overview of the relationship between expenditure inequality and polarization in Indonesia during 2002–2012. It also tries to reveal in which regional dimension, expenditure inequality and polarization occurred in Indonesia during the mentioned period. The issues have not been examined in previous empirical studies in Indonesia.

This paper investigates whether an outcome-based school aid formula could improve fiscal and outcome equity significantly more than a typical aid formula would. When outcome-based formula is applied to foundation aid, fiscal and outcome equity deteriorates compared to Ohio's recent aid formula. However, when it is applied to power-equalizing aid, the latter improves fiscal and outcome equity more significantly than both foundation aid and Ohio's recent aid formula do. This paper further shows how to apply them to real-world cases. The lessons from this paper can be easily applied to similar grant systems with standardized test scores.

This paper is to propose a novel generalized grey target decision method (GGTDM) with index and weight both containing mixed types of data.

The decision-making steps of the proposed approach are as follows. First, all mixed attribute values of alternatives and weights are transformed into binary connection numbers and also comprised two-tuple (determinacy, uncertainty) numbers. Then, the two-tuple (determinacy, uncertainty) numbers of target center indices are calculated. Next, the certain weights are determined by the Gini–Simpson (G–S) index-based method. Following this, the comprehensive-weighted Kullback–Leibler distances (CWKLDs) of all alternatives and the target center are obtained. Finally, the alternative ranking relies on the CWKLD considering the smaller value as the better option.

The certain weights determined by the improved Gini–Simpson index (IGSI) based method are more accurate in compared with that by the proximity-based method and the weight function method. The discrimination ability of alternatives ranking of the proposed approach is stronger than that of the compared comprehensive-weighted proximity (CWP) based method and comprehensive-weighted Gini–Simpson index (CWGSI) based method.

The proposed method fulfills the decision-making task relying on CWKLD, which solves the uncertain measurement from the viewpoint of entropy.

The proposed approach adopts the IGSI to transform uncertain weights into certain ones and takes the CWKLD as the basis for the decision-making.

The size distribution of income, or income inequality, has long been a concern to scholars in many disciplines tor different reasons. Statisticians have approached the distribution of income among individuals as a stochastic process. Economists have sought to explain income distribution by means, of economic and institutional factors. More recently, economists have been interested in the effects of economic growth and government policies on income distribution. Sociologists and political scientists have thought of income inequality as a major source of social revolt or political violence.

The reduction of income inequality and the ways to fight against it are source of debate among scientific communities and policymakers. Rents from natural resources that African countries are endowed with remain one way to cope with income inequality, but its influence on income inequality is mixed. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to explore the direct and indirect transmission mechanisms through which natural resources rents can affect income inequality in sub-Saharan Africa.

This study obtained data on income inequality from the Standardised World Income Inequality Data database, natural resources rents from World Bank’s Development Indicators and education from United Nations Development Programme for the period 1990–2018. It was analysed using system generalised method of moments.

The results of this study showed that natural resources rents solely increased income inequality, but its interaction with education significantly reduced income inequality.

These findings suggest that the reduction of income inequality by natural resources rents passes through a good education system in sub-Saharan African countries.

In previous studies, authors analysed the role of education in the relationship between natural resources rents and income inequality by inserting the two variables separately in the model. But in this paper, the author analysed the role of education in the relationship between natural resources rents and income inequality by using the interaction of natural resources rents and education.

This paper seeks to make the case for new research into the perceived fairness and impact of executive pay.

The paper reviews the literature regarding executive compensation and corporate performance and examines the evidence that a more egalitarian approach to pay could be justified in terms of long‐term shareholder value.

There would appear to be no evidence to suggest that the growing gap between the pay of executives and that of the average employee generates long‐term enterprise value, and it may even be detrimental to firms, if not the liberal capitalist consensus on which the corporate licence to operate is based.

The paper outlines a new approach to tracking income differentials with corporate performance through the development of a corporate Gini coefficient “league table”.

The proposed research is expected to point towards better practice in executive remuneration, and support the growing momentum for a sustainable and enlightened approach to business, in which the key goal is long‐term enterprise value based on a fair distribution of the rewards of business.

In producing a deeper understanding of the impact of widening income differentials, the paper should be of interest to senior executives in publicly quoted companies as well as press commentators, government officials and academics.

The data employed to measure income inequality usually come from household surveys, which commonly suffer from atypical observations such as outliers and contamination points. This is of importance since a single atypical observation can make classical inequality indices totally uninformative. To deal with this problem, robust univariate parametric or ad hoc procedures are commonly used; however, neither is fully satisfactory. The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology to deal with this problem.

The author propose two robust procedures to estimate inequality indices that can use all the information from a data set, and neither of them rely on a parametric distributional assumption. The methodology performs well irrespectively of the size and quality of the data set.

Applying these methods to household data for UK (1979) and Mexico (2006 and 2011), the author find that for UK data the Gini, Coefficient of Variation and Theil Inequality Indices are over estimated by between 0.02 and 0.04, while in the case of Mexico the same indices are over estimated more deeply, between 0.1 and almost 0.4. The relevance of including atypical observations that follow the linear pattern of the data are shown using the data from Mexico (2011).

The methodology has two main limitations: the procedures are not able to identify a bad leverage outlier from a contamination point; and in the case that the data has no atypical observations, the procedures will tag as atypical a very small fraction of observations.

A reduction in the estimate of inequality has important consequences from a policy maker perspective. First, ceteris paribus, the optimal amount of resources destinated to directly address inequality/poverty. Those “extra” resources can be destinated to promote growth. Notice that this is a direct consequence of having a more egalitarian economy than previously thought, this is due to the fact that poor people will actually enjoy a bigger share of any national income increment. This also implies that, in order to reduce poverty, public policies should focus more on economic growth.

To the knowledge, in the inequality literature this is the first methodology that is able to identify outliers and contamination points in more than one direction. That is, not only at the tails of the distribution, but on the whole marginal distribution of income. This is possible via the use of other variables related to income.

This study aims to analyse the role of zakat in poverty alleviation and income inequality reduction based on the gender of zakat recipients.

This study used the Centre of Islamic Economic and Business Studies (CIBEST) model as a poverty measure and the Gini coefficient and Atkinson index as income inequality measures to analyse 1,300 zakat recipients in five different areas of West Java, Indonesia.

Based on the CIBEST model, zakat distribution programmes have better salutary effects on male-headed households in terms of material (0.215) and absolute (0.037) poverty indices, whereas female-headed households have better performance on the falah (0.438) and spiritual (0.022) poverty indices, with greater changes in these indices in female-headed households. According to the Gini coefficient and Atkinson index, female-headed households have better income distribution one-year after zakat distribution programmes, whereas the male-headed households have better performance in regards to welfare loss.

The present study only used the poverty line standard published by the Central Board of Statistics from the Republic of Indonesia to identify respondents who live under the poverty line.

This paper can serve as a reference for zakat institutions in the implementation of zakat distribution programmes when the gender of zakat recipients is taken into consideration.

Not many studies have analysed the impact of gender in zakat distribution programmes despite gender being one of the most important determinants of poverty and income inequality. This study attempts to determine the economic impact of zakat from the perspective of gender.