TY - BOOK ID - 134235821 TI - Re-Interpreting Sub-Group Inequality Decompositions AU - Elbers, Chris AU - Lanjouw, Peter AU - Mistiaen, Johan A. AU - Ozler, Berk PY - 2005 PB - Washington, D.C., The World Bank, DB - UniCat KW - Between-Group Inequality KW - Differences In Income KW - Economic Inequality KW - Economic Policy KW - Equity and Development KW - Group Inequality KW - Group Means KW - Income KW - Income Differences KW - Income Distribution KW - Income Inequality KW - Incomes KW - Inequality KW - Inequality Aversion KW - Inequality Decomposition KW - Inequality Measurement KW - Mean Differences KW - Mean Income KW - Mean Incomes KW - Measurement Error KW - Policy Research KW - Population Sub-Groups KW - Poverty Impact Evaluation KW - Poverty Reduction KW - Rural Development KW - Rural Poverty Reduction KW - Services and Transfers to Poor UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:134235821 AB - The authors propose a modification to the conventional approach of decomposing income inequality by population sub-groups. Specifically, they propose a measure that evaluates observed between-group inequality against a benchmark of maximum between-group inequality that can be attained when the number and relative sizes of groups under examination are fixed. The authors argue that such a modification can provide a complementary perspective on the question of whether a particular population breakdown is salient to an assessment of inequality in a country. As their measure normalizes between-group inequality by the number and relative sizes of groups, it is also less subject to problems of comparability across different settings. The authors show that for a large set of countries their assessment of the importance of group differences typically increases substantially on the basis of this approach. The ranking of countries (or different population groups) can also differ from that obtained using traditional decomposition methods. Finally, they observe an interesting pattern of higher levels of overall inequality in countries where their measure finds higher between-group contributions. ER -