Notes on “Notes on the Gini Coefficient”

Abstract

A point of historical interest – undoubtedly arcane to some – is that Gini (1914) introduced no fewer than 13 Gini coefficients. Two of them appear to have survived the test of time and are widely used. While these agree ordinally on all inequality comparisons for any given population, they disagree across comparisons with populations of varying sizes. In this note, I make a case for keeping one of the two measures and discarding the other.