Weak Orders for Intersecting Lorenz Curves: Analysis of income distribution in European countries

The low growth of the EU performance has increased concerns regarding an increasing wage dispersion and income inequality, which hampers sustainable and inclusive economic development. In this context, the Lorenz curve can be used to define different ranking criteria for comparison of income distributions in terms of inequality, such as the Lorenz dominance and some weaker dominance relations that have been introduced more recently in the literature. In this paper, we review such methods and propose an empirical study with which we analyse and compare the income distributions of the 28 European Union member states (EU-28) plus other five European countries, on the basis of the dominance criteria discussed. The database for empirical analysis has been downloaded from the Eurostat’s website – Income and living conditions statistics.