Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

Gini coefficient: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

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Ginicoefficient1 CONSTRUCTGini coefficientGINI · INEQUALITY INDEX

A single standalone construct; nearby constructs are located against it in the Collider. Tap a field for its definition, unit, and measures.

Economics

The 0 to 1 measure of income or wealth inequality

Corrado Gini introduced this measure in his 1912 monograph Variabilità e mutabilità, giving a single number for how unequally a quantity, most often income or wealth, is spread across a population. The coefficient runs from 0, where everyone holds an identical share and the distribution is perfectly equal, to 1, where one person holds everything and all others hold nothing, so a larger value marks greater concentration. It is commonly read off the Lorenz curve, the plot introduced by Max Lorenz in 1905 that traces the cumulative share of total income held by the poorest fraction of a population, and equals twice the area between that curve and the 45 degree line of perfect equality. Because it compresses an entire distribution into one comparable number, it is the standard summary statistic for inequality in economics and official statistics, reported for nations and regions worldwide. A separate and unrelated homonym, the Gini impurity used in machine learning to score how mixed the classes are at a decision-tree split, shares only the name and is not treated as a construct here.[1][2][3]

Unit
A dimensionless ratio between 0 and 1, sometimes reported as a percentage and then called the Gini index, summarising one distribution
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Computed from a distribution as twice the area between the Lorenz curve and the line of perfect equality, equivalently as half the mean absolute difference between all pairs of values divided by the mean, using survey, census, or tax microdata

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Nearby constructs

concentration4 fields · 4 citationsjingle · one word, four constructsdispersion4 fields · 6 citationsjingle · one word, four constructsLorenz curve1 fields · 3 citationsanchor · a standalone construct

References

  1. Gini, C. (1912). Variabilità e mutabilità: Contributo allo studio delle distribuzioni e delle relazioni statistiche. Tipografia di Paolo Cuppini.
  2. Lorenz, M. O. (1905). Methods of measuring the concentration of wealth. Publications of the American Statistical Association, 9(70), 209–219. https://doi.org/10.1080/15225437.1905.10503443
  3. Ceriani, L., & Verme, P. (2012). The origins of the Gini index: Extracts from Variabilità e Mutabilità (1912) by Corrado Gini. The Journal of Economic Inequality, 10(3), 421–443. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-011-9188-x

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