Chotikapanich, Duangkamon; Griffiths, William E.; Rao, D. S. Prasada
(
2005-02)
A major problem encountered in studies of income inequality at regional and globallevels is the estimation of income distributions from data that are in a summary form.In this paper we estimate national and regional income distributions within a generalframework that relaxes the assumption of constant income within groups. A techniqueto estimate the parameters of a beta-2 distribution using grouped data is proposed.Regional income distribution is modelled using a mixture of country-specificdistributions and its properties are examined. The techniques are used to analysenational and regional inequality trends for eight East Asian countries and twobenchmark years, 1988 and 1993.