'Regional inequalities in income and opportunity are developing in Essay

'Regional inequalities in income and opportunity are developing in such a way that the gap emerging between rich and poor regions could threaten Russia's integr - Essay Example Regional inequalities in income and opportunity refer to inequalities that make the gap between the rich and poor that could threaten Russia’s integrity. For the inequality to make to threaten Russia’s integrity, it must be defined as that will merit political or social action on the part of the Russian government. To undertand that extent of this inequality, there must be a way of measuring the same. A way to do it is the Gini coefficient, which a measure of inequality of a distribution. Italian statistician Corrado Gini developed this Gini coefficient and published the same in his 1912 paper "Variability and Mutability". The term is a ratio with values between 0 and 1: where the numerator is the area between the Lorenz curve of the distribution and the uniform (perfect) distribution line and the denominator is the area under the uniform distribution line. The Gini index then is the Gini coefficient that is converted as a percentage, by multiplying it by 100. The Gini coefficient is used to measure income inequality, where 0 corresponds to perfect income equality and 1 corresponds to perfect income inequality (Wikipedia, 2007) (Paraphrasing made). The coefficient could be used to measure both inequality of income and opportunity. Inequality in income could be easily understood to refer to per capita income but inequality of opportunity must be defined clearly. Mitra, P. and Yemtsov, R. (2006) distinguished equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes as follows: â€Å"The World Development Report (2006) makes a persuasive case for policies that promote equality of opportunity, defined as opportunities to pursue a life of an individual’s choosing and be spared from extreme deprivation in outcomes. However, it cites the examples of decollectivization of agriculture in China in the late 1970s and wage decompression in Central and Eastern Europe following the onset of transition in those countries as cases