Inter-group Disparities in the Distributional Analysis of Human Development: Concepts, Measurement, and Illustrative Applications

Abstract

An important feature of most segmented societies is that deprivations and well-being achievements are unequally distributed across well-defined sub-groups of the population, when the latter is partitioned according to a variety of social or geographical categories, such as gender, caste, ethnicity, religion, occupation, sector of origin, or region of domicile. Group disparities are a matter of both instrumental interest in assessing the nature of a society (such as in terms of its propensity for conflict) and intrinsic concern in evaluations of a society's record of ‘horizontal’ distributive justice. One aspect of a study of population heterogeneity would reside in the measurement of inter-group inequalities in the distribution of a society's burdens and benefits. It is this aspect of the problem that is reviewed in the present paper. It is useful to note that group inequality can be categorized into different types (which are nevertheless mutually linked by certain commonalities of purpose and motivation), and a particularly instructive taxonomy is available in a recent paper by Arjun Jayadev and Sanjay Reddy ('Inequalities and Identities’, which is available on the website of the Social Science Research Network, at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1162275 ). The present paper also presents taxonomy of alternative approaches to reckoning group inequality, and discusses a number of real-valued measures of group disparity, mainly based on work in which this author has earlier engaged, by himself or in collaboration.