A Pair of Social Welfare Functions and a New Measure of Inequality

Welfare judgement on income distribution has often been made on the basis of weighted sum of individual incomes, the weights being based on some notion of relative deprivation. In a recent contribution to this Journal, Chakrabarty (1995) proposed a set of weights leading to a Social Welfare Function (SWF) based on Theil's entropy measure, not normalised. This paper proposes two more sets of weights leading to a pair of SWFs with similar properties and interpretations. Properties of a new measure of inequality derived from these SWFs are also scrutinised.