A Ranking of States by Inequality Using Census and Tax Data
W HILE students of the American economy IV, I are blessed with some excellent data for measuring the functional distribution of personal income for individual states, there are virtually no statistics on the size distribution of income for these areas. (Stigler's state-by-state estimates of the income shares of the upper one per cent of the population are the best effort yet made to get at the latter kind of information.)' Nor does the present paper give income size distributions for states. My purpose here is the much more modest one of reporting the results of a try at deriving indicators of income inequality that can be used as a basis for comparing each state with the others. The first part of this report describes how Gini indexes of income were constructed for states and the District of Columbia for the year 1959. The bulk of the remainder is occupied with assaying the credibility of these indexes. This evaluation may be thought of as a test of the hypothesis that the Gini indexes of income possess merit as a basis upon which to compare these 51 areas. The test consists of correlations of the indexes with corresponding Gini indexes for housing and education, created especially for this purpose, as well as a few other characteristics for these areas. Alternatively, were one disposed to simply accept the Gini indexes of income as being adequate for their professed role, it might be interesting to regard the following exercise as a test of the hypothesis that there is a demonstrable interrelationship among various sorts of measurable inequality.
- DOI
- 10.2307/1927087
- Volume
- 48 (3)
- Pages
- 314
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