Measuring the Economic Affluence between Populations of Income Receivers
提出一种衡量不同收入分布之间相对经济富裕程度的新指标D，并应用于1967和1979年美国白人与黑人家庭收入数据，发现白人对黑人的相对富裕程度下降，这与距离函数得出的结论不同。
This article introduces and discusses a new measure of the relative economic affluence (REA) between income distributions with different means. The REA measure D is applied to the U.S. white and black household income distributions of 1967 and 1979. The measure D shows that the REA of the white households with respect to the black households decreased from 1967 to 1979. This conclusion contrasts with those obtained by applications of distance or quasi-distance functions. It is shown in this study that REA measures and distance functions address different and relevant issues. An REA measure deals with the relation more affluent than and defines a partial strict ordering over the set of pairs of income distributions-that is, the relation is asymmetric and transitive-whereas a distance function accounts for the dissimilarity between distributions without imposing an ordering relation and hence fulfills the symmetry property.