[Forum SIS] Seminario Sapienza (C. Gigliarano)

[Fulvio De Santis]

DOTTORATO DI RICERCA IN STATISTICA METODOLOGICA
DIPARTIMENTO DI SCIENZE STATISTICHE 
SAPIENZA UNIVERSITA' DI ROMA

AVVISO DI SEMINARIO

Il giorno giovedì 22 marzo 2012, alle ore 15, nell'ambito delle attività del Dottorato di Ricerca in Statistica Metodologica, 
la dott.ssa Chiara Gigliarano (U. Politecnica delle Marche) terrà un seminario dal titolo 
Measuring polarization in one and many attributes.
Tutti gli interessati sono invitati a partecipare.
Saluti cordiali

Giovanni Maria Giorgi e Fulvio De Santis

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Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche
Sala 34 (IV piano)
Sapienza Università di Roma
Piazzale A. Moro 5, 00185, Roma.


Measuring polarization in one and many attributes

Chiara Gigliarano
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona

Polarization measurement is one of the most relevant issues recently raised up in the welfare economics literature beyond poverty and inequality analysis. After a brief review of the two main strands existing in the literature on income polarization, we focus on one of them and identify polarization with the decline of the middle class. A new approach is introduced to spot the middle class of a society and to measure its possible decline. In particular, we extend the definition of middle class in terms of a central interval rather than the median income. Then, a new class of univariate polarization measures is derived axiomatically, which can be seen as a generalization of existing indices of income polarization. But, societal status of a person and distance between persons (and groups) is not determined by income alone but also by other monetary and non‐ monetary characteristics of well‐being, such as wealth, education, and health. We present, therefore, one of the few contributions to measure polarization in many attributes. The middle class is a properly defined central region in attribute space that contains a fixed portion of the population. The decline of the middle class is measured by comparing its dispersion. The use of minimum volume ellipsoids and different notions of central regions is discussed in one and several dimensions. Then, postulates for multidimensional polarization measurement are stated and discussed. An empirical illustration is provided based on an application to EU countries. 
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