Objective Inequality Indexes Joining Income with Life Expectancy Through the Life Quality Index of Sub-populations
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Objective Inequality Indexes Joining Income with Life Expectancy Through the Life Quality Index of Sub‑populations Niels Lind1 Accepted: 21 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Two indexes are developed to compare inequality: one within, the other between countries. The indexes are objective, more transparent and comprehensive. They integrate inequality of mortality with income inequality by using the Life Quality Index for sub-populations, focusing on the poorer ones, below the medians of life expectancy at birth and income together. The Life Equality Index directs attention to local inequality and can support policy interventions. The Inequality-Adjusted Life Quality Index is an alternative to the established Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index IHDI that also gives international rankings but suffers from the intrinsic shortcomings of its parent index HDI. The sub-populations are defined through the abridged life tables and third-degree polynomial approximations of the Lorenz curves. Among the countries studied, totaling over 62% of the world population, the results show that those that rank high by the Life Quality Index have also developed high internal equality and high quality-adjusted incomes. Just as the Life Quality Index generally increases with time for almost all countries, so do the equality and the quality-adjusted income, particularly for the poorer. Keywords Equality · Inequality · Life quality · Index · Sub-population · Quality-adjusted income
1 Introduction 1.1 Background While average living standards have improved and poverty has receded worldwide, there remains a worry that inequality has grown much in the twenty-first century (UNDP 2019; WID 2018). Many people enjoy higher life quality, but many others— perhaps a large majority—may have been left behind. Inequality is high and appears to be rising worldwide. Economic inequality has been the focus of attention (e.g., Piketty
* Niels Lind [email protected] 1
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada
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and Saez 2014), but inequality is more than merely economic. There are many other dimensions: inequality of gender, race, health, opportunity and so on (see e.g., Lagarde 2018). The first steps are to broaden the inequality concept and make it measurable. Overall inequality between countries as a whole was quantified by the United Nations Development Programme, publishing its human development index HDI in 1990 and yearly thereafter (UNDP 2019). The HDI casts no light on the inequality within a country, so the UNDP some years ago developed its supplementary inequalityadjusted human development index IHDI, and is now focusing on inequality (UNDP 2019). These indexes, HDI and IHDI, are compounds of measured social indicators, but in the compounding they unfortunately lose objectivity by employing arbitrary parameters that distort all the index values and rankings among countries. Moreover, the essence of inequality, between and within countries, is obscured as just numbers between z
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