A comparative study of the Gini coefficient estimators based on the linearization and U-statistics Methods

Abstract

In this paper, we consider two well-known methods for analysis of the Gini index, which are U-statistics and linearization for some income distributions. In addition, we evaluate two different methods for some properties of their proposed estimators. Also, we compare two methods with resampling techniques in approximating some properties of the Gini index. A simulation study shows that the linearization method performs 'well' compared to the Gini estimator based on U-statistics. A brief study on real data supports our findings.

Keywords

• gini coefficient
• inequality index
• u-statistics
• linearization method