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What Kind of Inequality Do You Prefer? Evaluating Measures of Income and Health Inequality Using Choice Experiments

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When measuring inequality using conventional inequality measures, ethical assumptions about distributional preferences are often implicitly made. In this paper, we ask whether the ethical assumptions underlying the concentration index for income-related inequality in health and the Gini index for income inequality are supported in a representative sample of the Swedish population using an internet-based survey. We find that the median subject has preferences regarding income-related inequality in health that are in line with the ethical assumptions implied by the concentration index, but put higher weight on the poor than what is implied by the Gini index of income inequality. We find that women and individuals with a poorer health status put higher weight on the poor than men and healthier individuals. Ethically flexible inequality measures, such as the s-Gini index and the extended concentration index, imply that researchers have to choose from a toolbox of infinitely many inequality indices. The results of this paper are indicative of which indices (i.e. which parameter values) reflect the views of the population regarding how inequality should be defined.

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  • Hardardottir, Hjördis & Gerdtham, Ulf-G. & Wengström, Erik, 2019. "What Kind of Inequality Do You Prefer? Evaluating Measures of Income and Health Inequality Using Choice Experiments," Working Papers 2019:7, Lund University, Department of Economics, revised 31 May 2019.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2019_007
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    1. Campos-Mercade, Pol & Meier, Armando N. & Schneider, Florian H. & Wengström, Erik, 2021. "Prosociality predicts health behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 195(C).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Socioeconomic inequality in health; Income inequality; Extended concentration index; S-Gini index; Distributional preferences;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • D90 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - General
    • I14 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Inequality

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