Entropy and Gini: is entropy different from inequality?

ScienceDirect – European Economic Review : Generalized entropy and the measurement of distributional change. Abstract: “The analogy between information theory and income distribution analysis is exploited to derive a number of measures of distributional change. These include not only counterparts of the regular entropy measures, but also of the entire, rich ‘generalised entropy’ family. The paper analyses the properties of these measures, and in particular their performance in response to ‘independent’ transfers and to cases where an income transfer in the old distribution automatically produces a corresponding transfer in the new distribution. The relationship of such ‘functionally dependent’ transfers to a measure of tax progression is examined.”

Also, this paper is relevant, although it focuses on how measuring inequality with entropy creates imperfect results for economics research. Abstract: “In this article we provide an overview of the Gini decomposition and the generalized entropy inequality measures, a free access to their computation, an application on French wages, and a different way than Dagum to demonstrate that the Gini index is a more convenient measure than those issued from entropy: Theil, Hirschman-Herfindahl and Bourguignon.” via Decomposition of Gini and the generalized entropy inequality measures.