Estimation and interpretation of measures of inequality, poverty, and social welfare using Stata

This presentation reviews methods for summarizing and comparing income distributions, together with the related literature about variance estimation for a range of summary measures. Although the focus is on income and the perspective is that of an economist, the methods have been widely applied to other variables, including health-related ones, and by researchers from many disciplines. Topics covered include the measurement of inequality, poverty, and social welfare, and distributional comparisons based on the dominance methods as well as summary indices. Illustrations are provided using a suite of public-domain Stata programs written by the author and collaborators (e.g., glcurve, ineqdeco, povdeco, sumdist, svyatk, svygei, svylorenz), together with built-in commands.