Income Distribution and Social Policy: Relevance for the Social Dimension of Sustainability

Abstract

This publication provides clues to the phenomenon of increasing social division within rich societies. At the same time, it refers to more recent insights of a partly empirical, partly mathematical type, which make it possible to describe the income situation of mature states/market economies solely by means of the so-called Gini coefficient. The Gini coefficient is the most important parameter for describing inequalities. The fact that it can fully describe the situation in the case of income distribution is both surprising and practically helpful. The present paper also refers to some consequences of the analysis of income distributions for the interpretation of political processes. It also provides information on the so-called “efficient inequality range”. This describes the spectrum in which balance or inequality has a positive effect on societies. A variety of further details on the issues addressed can be found in the references given, in particular [4, 6, 9].