Economic and Spatial Measures of Inequality

There are many quantitative indicators by which inequalities may be measured. Each measure takes a distributionDistribution of a certain quantity (e.g. the most common is income, but it can be any other quantity such as wealth, happiness, or accessAccess), and summarizes the degree of inequality via a single scalar number. The primary task is to take a distributionDistribution of some quantity, say income, and assign to it a single number that characterizes how (un)equal the distributionDistribution is. This chapter reviews and critiques standard inequality measures and proposes spatial-geographic extensions to these measures. The measures in this chapter are most useful when employed to analyze spatial inequalities at an intra-cityIntra-city inequality level.