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	Theil Inequality Decomposition	Atkinson Index	Gini Coefficient
Campo	Economia	Sociology	Sociology
Famiglia	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Anno di origine	1967	1970	1912
Ideatore	Henri Theil (1967); decomposition class by Anthony Shorrocks (1980)	Anthony Barnes Atkinson	Corrado Gini
Tipo	Decomposable inequality measure	Welfare-based, parameterized inequality index	Scalar measure of statistical dispersion / inequality
Fonte seminale	Theil, H. (1967). Economics and Information Theory. Amsterdam: North-Holland. ISBN: 9780444814630	Atkinson, A. B. (1970). On the measurement of inequality. Journal of Economic Theory, 2(3), 244–263.	Ceriani, L., & Verme, P. (2012). The origins of the Gini index: extracts from Variabilità e Mutabilità (1912) by Corrado Gini. The Journal of Economic Inequality, 10(3), 421–443.
Alias	Theil Index, Theil's T and L, Generalized Entropy Decomposition, Within-Between Inequality Decomposition	Atkinson inequality measure, Atkinson's A, welfare-based inequality index	Gini index, Gini ratio, Gini concentration ratio, G
Correlati	3	5	5
Sintesi	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.	The Atkinson index is a welfare-based measure of inequality that incorporates an explicit, analyst-chosen parameter for how much society dislikes inequality. Introduced by Anthony Atkinson in 1970, it asks what fraction of total income could be discarded, under an equal distribution, while leaving social welfare unchanged — making the ethical judgement behind any inequality comparison transparent rather than hidden.	The Gini coefficient is the most widely used single-number summary of inequality in a distribution such as income or wealth. Introduced by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini in 1912, it equals twice the area between the Lorenz curve and the line of perfect equality, ranging from 0 when everyone has the same amount to a maximum approaching 1 when one unit holds everything.