Re: st: re: Inequality of education: ineqdec0?

["Francesco Burchi" <fburchi@uniroma3.it>]

Dear Martin,

Than you for the interesting point you raise. However, this does not
seem to be an issue in my case because I am analyzing the changes in
inequality in Peru during the crisis of end 1980s-beginning of 1990s. It
seems that the average years of education fall for most of the groups
and inequality slightly raises. My idea was to use different inequality
indices, such as the Gini, Entropy, as well as the coefficient of
variation, which, as you suggest, takes into consideration the average
years of education since it is given by the standard deviation divided
by the mean. My question is: can I simply use the "ineqdec0 EDU" command
to compute the Gini for years of schooling? Any suggestion on other
indices?

Thanks,
Francesco  

--- On Thu, 18/2/10, Francesco Burchi wrote: 
> I am using individual data to calculate inequality of 
> educational participation across people in a country 
> in 3 different year. I would like to compute the Gini 
> coefficient and possibly other indices of inequality 
> on the variable "years of schooling". Can I use the 
> simple command: 
> Ineqdec0 EDU ? 
> 
> The problems is that years of schooling is a discrete 
> variable, which presents many 0-values, and I am not 
> sure whether I can use the same procedure used for 
> computing income inequality. Moreover, can I compare 
> directly the indices for the three years? 
...[show rest of quote]

One problem you would need to consider is that any 
changes in inequality over time will be influenced by 
educational expansion, i.e. more recent cohorts get more 
education than older cohorts. So what usualy happens is 
that initially there isn't much inequality because a 
large portion of the population was bunched at the lowest 
level (i.e. everybody is equally misserable). In later 
cohorts people get more education, which means that there 
is more possibility to differ from one another, and thus 
inequality increases. So, if you see an increase in 
inequality over time you need to ask yourself, do I see 
an increase in inequality or an increase in the average 
level of education? In my sub-discipline such an increase 
in inequality would be considered a trivial consequence of 
educational expansion. At least you would need to discuss 
the relation between inequality and changes the average 
level of education. One way to do so is to show how the 
distribution of education changes over time. You could a 
stacked bar chart for that. 

Hope this helps, 
Maarten 

-------------------------- 
Maarten L. Buis 
Institut fuer Soziologie 
Universitaet Tuebingen 
Wilhelmstrasse 36 
72074 Tuebingen 
Germany 

http://www.maartenbuis.nl
--------------------------

Dear Statalisters, 

I am using individual data to calculate inequality of educational 
participation across people in a country in 3 different year. I would 
like to compute the Gini coefficient and possibly other indices of 
inequality on the variable "years of schooling". Can I use the simple 
command: 
Ineqdec0 EDU ? 

The problems is that years of schooling is a discrete variable, which 
presents many 0-values, and I am not sure whether I can use the same 
procedure used for computing income inequality. Moreover, can I compare 
directly the indices for the three years? 

Thanks, 
Francesco 


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