Interpretation of changes in rank-dependent measures of inequality

Measures of inequality suffer from the lack of an immediate interpretation which clarifies how significant any observed change in inequality might be. This paper addresses this problem by introducing a hypothetical tax/transfer intervention which redistributes a constant amount of income so as to make the value of a rank-dependent inequality measure for a specific distribution of income equal to the inequality for some other distribution. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science S.A.