This book provides a synthesis of some recent issues and an up-to-date
treatment of some of the major important issues in distributional
analysis that I have covered in my previous book Ethical Social Index
Numbers, which was widely accepted by students, teachers, researchers
and practitioners in the area. Wide coverage of on-going and advanced
topics and their analytical, articulate and authoritative p- sentation
make the book theoretically and methodologically quite contemporary and
inclusive, and highly responsive to the practical problems of recent
concern. Since many countries of the world are still characterized by
high levels of income inequality, Chap. 1 analyzes the problems of
income inequality measurement in detail. Poverty alleviation is an
overriding goal of development and social policy. To formulate
antipoverty policies, research on poverty has mostly focused on inco-
based indices. In view of this, a substantive analysis of income-based
poverty has been presented in Chap. 2. The subject of Chap. 3 is
people's perception about income inequality in terms of deprivation.
Since polarization is of current concern to analysts and social decisi-
makers, a discussion on polarization is presented in Chap. 4.