What is Inequality?

Every year, before the Annual World Economic Forum at Davos, Oxfam International releases its annual inequality report. Each report looks to capture a different dimension of inequality (lik but fundamentally revolves around the various forms of inequality that have now become ubiquitous. It is in light of this that we first look at what inequality means and what its impacts are on our day to day life.

What is inequality? 
The Cambridge dictio as “the unfair situation in society when some people have more opportunities, etc. than other people”. The it even more simply as “the state of not being equal, especially in status, rights and opportunities”. 
While the term itself is quite vast and has various interpretations, for the purpose of simplicity, the two large umbrellas under which we can classify inequality would be economic inequality and social inequality. Both these categories are deeply intertwined and inequality in one often affects the inequality in another. Over the years, through its course of study,has studied inequality as a grave social injustice and has documented the incidents and scale of this inequality at a global level. 

Economic Inequality 
Perhaps the most quantified and calculated form of inequality is the economic variant. Even here, the most predominant forms of inequality measured are those of income inequality and wealth inequality. Income inequality is the inequality in and disparity in the incomes commanded by the top percentile of the population in comparison to the bottom percentiles, while wealth inequality measures look to do the same but by calculating disparities in wealth instead of income.

Income
“Income is not just the money received through pay, but all the money received from employment (wages, salaries, bonuses etc.), investments, such as interest on savings accounts and dividends from shares of stock, savings, state benefits, pensions (state, personal, company) and rent.”

Wealth
“Wealth refers to the total amount of assets of an individual or household. This may include financial assets, such as bonds and stocks, property and private pension rights. Wealth inequality, therefore, refers to the unequal distribution of assets in a group of people”