Variation Index: A New Alternative for Measuring Income Inequality
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This technical note proposes a new index for measuring income inequality (or the inequality of a distribution), named as the “variation index (VI)”. The proposed VI is dimensionless and bounded between 0 and 1, with 0 indicating perfect equality and 1 indicating extreme inequality. Several examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed VI and to compare it with existing inequality indices, including the coefficient of variation (CV) and the Gini coefficient.