Inequality, Welfare And Poverty: Three Interrelated Phenomena

Abstract

Sen (1973), in the preface of his book on economic inequality, points out that the idea of inequality is both very simple and very complex. It is simple if it is defined merely as the dispersion of a frequency distribution. But then there exist several measures of dispersion which can result in contradictory conclusions about the relative merits of income distributions. The pure statistical approach to measuring inequality is of little help in deciding if one income distribution is more or less equal than another.