New method accurately measures income inequality in small areas.
Small area estimation is important for getting statistics about small regions. This article introduces a new method to estimate inequality measures like the Theil index and Gini coefficient for small areas. The researchers used a robust approach to handle non-normal data with outliers, like income information. They applied this method to income data from Tuscany to estimate inequality measures for different age groups. The results show that the new method works well and gives accurate estimates for small areas.