The study of inequality, polarization and poverty is crucial for understanding the economic well-being of the population of a country. Conceptual and methodological advances and better data have provided better insights into these issues in recent years, and it is the objective of the book to present a systematic and up-to-date treatment of the developments in the subject. Both welfare theoretic and descriptive approaches are discussed and, since the wellbeing of a population depends on income and non-income indicators, both unidimensional and multidimensional frameworks are taken into consideration. The technical terms and mathematical operations employed to analyze the results are explained intuitively in non-technical terms, and numerical analyses and graphical representations help to illustrate important concepts.

Zusammenfassung
This book provides a synthesis of some recent issues and an up-to-date treatment of some of the major important issues in distributional analysis that I have covered in my previous book Ethical Social Index Numbers, which was widely accepted by students, teachers, researchers and practitioners in the area. Wide coverage of on-going and advanced topics and their analytical, articulate and authoritative p- sentation make the book theoretically and methodologically quite contemporary and inclusive, and highly responsive to the practical problems of recent concern. Since many countries of the world are still characterized by high levels of income inequality, Chap. 1 analyzes the problems of income inequality measurement in detail. Poverty alleviation is an overriding goal of development and social policy. To formulate antipoverty policies, research on poverty has mostly focused on inco- based indices. In view of this, a substantive analysis of income-based poverty has been presented in Chap. 2. The subject of Chap. 3 is people's perception about income inequality in terms of deprivation. Since polarization is of current concern to analysts and social decisi- makers, a discussion on polarization is presented in Chap. 4.

Inhalt
The Measurement of Income Inequality.- Inequality and Income Poverty.- Measuring Income Deprivation.- The Measurement of Income Polarization.- The Measurement of Multidimensional Inequality.- The Measurement of Multidimensional Poverty.