MEASURING INEQUALITY IN NAOGAON ZILA:

Equality has long been among the most potent of human ideals, and it continues to play a prominent role in political argument. Views about equality inform much of the debate about such wide-ranging issues as racism, sexism, obligations to the poor or handicapped, relations between developed and underdeveloped countries, and the justification of competing political, economic, and ideological systems. Inequality means different things to different people: whether inequality should encapsulate ethical concepts such as the desirability of a particular system of rewards or simply mean differences in income is the subject of much debate. Here we will conceptualize inequality as the dispersion of a distribution, particularly that be income, expenditure or some other welfare indicator as attribute of a specific population.

Policy makers, researchers and academics are recently increasingly recognizing the links between inequality and other social and economic phenomena. The links between inequality and economic performance are being investigated through models where the causality runs from inequality to growth, rather than the reverse. Obviously, poverty and inequality are very closely linked for a given mean income, the more unequal the income distribution, the larger the percentage of the population living in income-poverty. This combination of increased social and political pressure and academic interest, together with the considerable recent expansion in the availability of household survey micro-data, means that the study of income and expenditure distributions has more recently gained enormous impetus.

Inequality is often studied as part of broader analyses covering poverty and welfare, although these three concepts are distinct. Inequality is a broader concept than poverty in that it is defined over the whole distribution, not only the censored distribution of individuals or households below a certain poverty line. Incomes at the top and in the middle of the distribution may be just as important to us in perceiving and measuring inequality as those at the bottom, and indeed some measures of inequality are driven largely by incomes in the upper tail. Inequality is also a much narrower concept than welfare. Although both of these capture the whole distribution of a given indicator, inequality is independent of the mean of the distribution and instead solely concerned with the second moment, the dispersion, of the distribution. However these three concepts are closely related and are sometimes combined in composite measures such as those proposed by Amartya Sen. This documentation covers some of the topics in this regard that have been directed to a case-study of Naogaon Zila of Bangladesh.

MEASURING INEQUALITY OF Income and Expenditure

Gini Index

Lorenz Ratio

Atkinson Measure of Inequality

MEASURING INEQUALITY OF LAND

Inequality of Land