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Social Indicators Research

Erschienen in:

01.11.2013

Multidimensional Racial Inequality in the United States

verfasst von: Nicholas Rohde, Ross Guest

Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research | Ausgabe 2/2013

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Abstract

This paper measures racial inequalities in the US using a multidimensional ‘wellbeing’ approach that simultaneously considers the distributions of income, health and education. The primary objective is to examine trends in US wellbeing inequality with an emphasis on changes in racial composition. Data is taken from 1990 to 2007 and we observe increases in income inequality, a decline in education inequality and unchanged health inequality over the period. Taken together, these results show a slight increase in the dispersion in multidimensional wellbeing. Stratifying by racial groups shows that this increase is due to widening intra-racial inequalities while inter-racial differences remained unchanged. The method is also used to evaluate wellbeing across groups and we estimate black wellbeing to average around 76 % of whites, while persons from other races average approximately 93 %. Some other changes in composition occur through time and the results are shown to be robust to a number of changes in parametric weightings.

Vorheriger Artikel Social Correlates of Psychological Well-Being Among Undergraduate Students in Mysore City

Nächster Artikel Cross-Cultural Difference in Subjective Wellbeing: Cultural Response Bias as an Explanation

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These three indicators represent a fairly typical set e.g. see the recent work by Bossert et al. (2011).

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In principle β could vary among attributes, reflecting different degrees of flexibility in substituting one attribute for another within a given index. This is left for future work.

For example 8.6 % of observations hit the educational top-code of 17 years in 2007 while only 6.9 % of observations reached this value in 1990.

The assessment of trends in perceived health is valid provided that (i) the subjective scores are appropriate indicators of true health status, and (ii) the self assessments are consistent across both time and across the racial groups.

Persons of Latino origin are classified as white.

The racial group ‘Other’ reports a higher average income than whites for 1991 and 1994. In all other instances whites outscore this group over all three criteria.

It should be noted that combining univariate inequality measurements is not a true ‘multidimensional’ technique as it misses the interaction that occurs between dimensions.

The time series available is too short to distinguish between stochastic and deterministic trends with the use of unit root tests and hence the regressions are conducted to identify significant movements within the sample rather than to describe the data-generating process. For this reason we also ignore potential autocorrelation issues.

Two sided p-vales are quoted in parentheses for a hypothesis test on the significance of the trend coefficient.

An impression of the changes in overall wellbeing over time can be gained by examining the racial means for each variable in Table 1.

Here the subscripts on the p-values refer to the parametric weighting specification employed.

Parameter estimates for the time trend coefficient (λ₁) for the regressions w _t = λ₁+λ₁ t + e _t are (1) 0.000801, (2) 0.00107, (3) 0.000715 and 0.000997 for the four specifications. Dividing the gaps between white and black wellbeing at 2007 levels by these estimates yields estimated times to convergence of (1) 286 years, (2) 234 years, (3) 358 years and (4) 271 years.

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Titel: Multidimensional Racial Inequality in the United States
verfasst von: Nicholas Rohde
Ross Guest
Publikationsdatum: 01.11.2013
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: Social Indicators Research / Ausgabe 2/2013
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0163-0

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