The Gini Coefficient

By Jodi Beggs, About.com Guide

The Lorenz curve is a diagonal 45-degree line in societies that have perfect income equality. This is simply because, if everyone makes the same amount of money, the bottom 10 percent of people make 10 percent of the money, the bottom 27 percent of people make 27 percent of the money, and so on.

Therefore, the area labeled A in the previous diagram is equal to zero in perfectly equal societies. This implies that A/(A+B) is also equal to zero, so perfectly equal societies have Gini coefficients of zero.

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• What Is the Gini Coefficient?
• The Lorenz Curve
• Calculating the Gini Coefficient
• A Lower Bound on the Gini Coefficient
• An Upper Bound on the Gini Coefficient
• The Gini Coefficient

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