SOC 100A Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Gini Coefficient, Economic Inequality, Iqvia
31 Dec 2018
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Economic inequality is usually measured by income and/or wealth. Income refers to wages and returns on investments and can be reasonably tracked through general government taxation statistics. (top 20% earn 48% of income 11 x richer than poorest 20% who earn 4%) Wealth refers to all material possessions or assets (minus liabilities) and this is much harder to track in australia because unlike most other oecd countries (including the. Despite popular perceptions that australian society is relatively egalitarian, research (livingstone 2009) rates us as the fourth most unequal country in the oecd behind the. Another study (leigh 2013: 65) has us 9th. Either way, we are above average in the oecd for inequality. The main statistical measure used to plot inequality is called the gini coefficient which measures the ratio between the top and bottom brackets (deciles or quintiles) of income/wealth within a population.
