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Theil Inequality Decomposition/Evidence
Method evidence record

Theil Inequality Decomposition

The Theil index, introduced by Henri Theil in 1967 by importing Shannon's information theory into economics, measures income inequality as the divergence between each unit's income share and its population share. Its defining advantage is exact additive decomposability: total inequality splits cleanly into a within-group component (inequality inside each subgroup) and a between-group component (inequality between subgroup means). Theil's T and its companion L (mean log deviation) are the two best-known members of the generalized-entropy class, which Anthony Shorrocks showed in 1980 to be the only inequality measures that are additively decomposable in this way.

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Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.

Theil Index and Generalized-Entropy Decomposition of Inequality
Taxonomic method record · process-pipeline / economics
  • Theil, H. (1967). Economics and Information Theory. Amsterdam: North-Holland. · ISBN 9780444814630
  • Shorrocks, A. F. (1980). The class of additively decomposable inequality measures. Econometrica, 48(3), 613–625. · DOI 10.2307/1913126
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Related methods

Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.

Same method familyAtkinson Indexmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familyGini Coefficientmachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Same method familyShapley Decomposition of Inequalitymachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.

Evidence status

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Bibliographic sources are present. Claim-level evidence review has not been performed.

Sources

2 recorded citations, copied from the method source record.

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