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A review essay on a book edited by P. Moyes, C. Seidl, & A. Shorrocks, Inequalities: Theory, Experiments and Applications (Vienna: Springer, 2002). 8 References.

The focus of this Element is on the idea that choice is hierarchical so that there exists an order of acquisition of durable goods and assets as real incomes increase. Two main approaches to deriving such an order are presented, the so-called Paroush approach and Item Response Theory. An empirical illustration follows, based on the 2019 Eurobarometer Survey. The Element ends with two sections showing first how measures of inequality, poverty and welfare may be derived from such an order of acquisition, second that there is also an order of curtailment of expenditures when individuals face financial difficulties. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Although most traditional economic theory puts the individual at the centre of analysis, more recent approaches have acknowledged the importance of a wider sense of identity as a determinant of individual behaviour. Whether it is ethnicity, religion or gender, group membership is a central part of human life. This book presents new advances in areas which consider both the individual and the group when measuring inequalities and well-being.The first part of the book covers topics such as relative deprivation and happiness, domains where even economists have now recognized the

The book surveys the various methods which may be used in measuring segregation in the labor force. It makes a distinction between the concepts of concentration and segregation, between cardinal measures and an ordinal approach to the topic. It explains also how to decompose changes in segregation. Finally it indicates how to combine the analysis of wage discrimination with that of occupational segregation. In every chapter illustrations are given, based on Swiss data. The book should therefore be very useful to any social scientist interested in these issues

This paper deals with the evaluation of the relative performance of different groups when the achievements of the members of a group are summarised by the relative distribution of these achievements across various ordered categories. After reviewing a previous attempt by Herrero and Vilar to deal with this issue, we propose to adopt an approach introduced recently by Apouey, Silber and Xu who derived a measure of achievement that, in the case of ordinal variables, takes account of both the inequality and the location of a distribution. Their approach is then applied to the analysis of political opinions, using the International Social Survey Programme for the year 2009. We compare questions dealing with respectively the need for the government to reduce income inequality, the duty of the government to help poor and unemployed individuals and the inequality of opportunity in health and education. It appears that the correlations obtained for our summary indicator of political opinions, based on the data covering 41 countries, reflect quite well the distinction we made between the three types of questions on political opinions. In addition, regression results show that generally the higher the inequality in a country, the more likely it is that people will approve government intervention aimed at reducing inequality and poverty.