Organized by MARS, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Luxembourg with CREA, CSL, European Investment Bank Institute, LIS, LISER and STATEC. Financial support from the FNR is gratefully acknowledged. The lecture is free but requires registration by emailing inequality@uni.lu
The purpose of this lecture is to examine some selected aspects of income distributions across populations. We analyze the concept of inequality and some of its measures developed in the literature. An index of income inequality is a scalar measure of interpersonal income differences within a given population. Social scientists generally use four properties for a good measure of inequality. The measures compatible with these properties allow us to compare inequality, for example, between China and Luxembourg, two countries with very different population size; or, alternatively, between Mozambique and Luxembourg, two countries with very different per-capita GDP. The lecture provides a detailed analysis of these properties and their implications.