Abstract

LIBORIO, Mateus; MARTINUCI, Oseias; BERNARDES, Patrícia  and  EKEL, Petr. Measures and scales of income inequality in perspective. GOT [online]. 2018, n.15, pp.287-314. ISSN 2182-1267.  https://doi.org/10.17127/got/2018.15.012.

Studies show that there are different approaches to measuring income inequality. However, there is a lack of empirical analyses realized for different approaches, applied to the same unit of analysis, demonstrating the implications of changing the scale of analysis in its results. From this statement, in this paper, we present different measures of income inequality applied at different scales (city and urban census tracts). The results show that the census tracts with concentrating families of similar income, tend to be less unequal internally and more unequal in the interrelationship with other sectors. It is concluded that the measure of income inequality is sensitive to the scale of analysis. Significant distortions in the income inequality index caused by the change in the scale disfavor the comparisons of the index between different scales, but, at the same time, favor the inference of the degree of intra-urban income inequality.

Keywords : income inequality; census tracts; multivariate data analysis.

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