ABSTRACT
This chapter brings forth some competing views of distributive justice and discusses measurement and implementation issues of some widely used inequality measures. The examination of income distribution/income inequality may take at least two directions: functional distribution of income; and personal distribution of income. Attempts to measure economic inequality did not start from the premise of 'normative' economics. The World Income Inequality Database (WIID) provides statistical information on income/expenditure inequalities across time and space. An inequality measure is said to be subgroup consistent if any change in inequality of one of the subgroups leaving inequalities in other subgroups constant will change the total inequality of the population in the same direction. The concept of entropy has been widely applied for measuring inequality because of its decomposability property. The relationship between economic growth and income inequality has been discussed widely in the literature, but with little consensus on the direction of the relationship.
