ABSTRACT
The standard objective of the economic literature concerning inequality measurement is to compare single-dimensioned welfare indicators, such as income. However, in order to evaluate the social state of an individual, more than one criterion often needs to be applied, since economic disparity does not arise from the distribution of income alone. People are different in income, education, health, etc. and we must take several individual characteristics into account if we want to answer to the two questions posed by Sen (1997): “Why inequality?” and “Inequality of what?”. As was stressed by Sen (1980), Kolm (1997), Maasoumi (1986) and many other scholars, analysis of different individual attributes is crucial to understand and evaluate inequality between people. Unfortunately, inequality in the context of more than one variable has seldom been studied and indeed the literature on multidimensional inequality comparisons is rather sparse. Since, the problem is inherently complex, it is difficult to extend the ranking principles and measures from the univariate to the multivariate case. The main reason for this difficulty regards the interaction between income and non-income attributes.
