Center for Operations Research and Econometrics, Université Catholique de Louvain, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;Department of Economics, Duke University, Durham, NC 27706, U.S.A.
Abstract:
When incomes are ranked in descending order the social-evaluation function corresponding to the Gini relative inequality index can be written as a linear function withthe weights being the odd numbers in increasing order. We generalize this function by allowing the weights to be an arbitrary non-decreasing sequence of numbers. This results in a class of generalized Gini relative inequality indices and a class of generalized Gini absolute inequality indices. An axiomatic characterization of the latter class is also provided.