Appendix B - Constructing Gini coefficients in income, education, and health/longevity

Summary

This appendix discusses the technical and data-related issues of the actual construction and calculation of Gini coefficients in the spheres of income, education, and health/longevity for the international and US-based comparisons presented in chapters 3 and 4.

Chapter 3 explains that through the construction of the indicators “educational attainment” and “life-span attainment” (and with sufficient data), a Gini coefficient was calculated for goods in each of the dimensions of education and health/longevity. These measures may not be as “intuitive” as is the case for income, because it requires thinking of the total stock of education (in total years of schooling) or of the total stock of life span (in the total number of years lived by persons in a population). Each person in the population holds some share of education and longevity of life. In each of these important dimensions of well-being, there are inequalities that are revealed by a Gini coefficient.

For the cross-national comparison (see table 3.3), the requisite data for all three dimensions were available for an intersection of twenty developing countries. The Gini measures were calculated for these countries in particular, in order that the same countries could be compared in all three dimensions. The data sets, and the calculations, for each of the three dimensions are now considered in turn.

The income distribution data were obtained from the World Development Report (WDR) 1995, The data were already given in terms of income shares by quintile.