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Following
the initiative of Professor Samuel Kotz and the sustained collaboration
of Professors Samuel Kotz and Camilo Dagum, the Research Centre
on Income Distribution (C.R.I.Di.Re.), the Department of Quantitative
Methods and the Faculty of Economics “R. M. Goodwin”
of the University of Siena (Italy) are sponsoring and organizing
an the International Conference to Honor Two Eminent Social
Scientists in the Centenary of very important events that took
place in 1905. Corrado Gini defended his outstanding Doctoral Thesis
on the statistical analysis of births by gender, and Max O. Lorenz
published a remarkable paper in the former Series of the Journal
of the American Statistical Association, on methods of measuring
the concentration of income and wealth. It is intended to be a tribute
to the remarkable and permanent presence of C. Gini and M. O. Lorenz
seminal contributions in the research carried out in the last one
hundred years on the theme of the Conference by the community of
scholars. The theme of the Conference deals with Income
and Wealth Distribution, Income Inequality, Decomposition of Inequality
Ratios, Directional Distance Ratios between Distributions, Analysis
and Measurement of Poverty, Human Capital Methods of Estimation
and the Size Distribution of Human Capital. In effect:
1. Corrado Gini‘s outstanding Doctoral Thesis defended in 1905 at the historical University of Bologna, was accepted with the higher honors, and was awarded the “Vittorio Emanuele” Prize. It was published in 1908. In this year, C. Gini started his exceptional contributions to income inequality, mathematically proving that the Pareto inequality parameter is an equality, and not an inequality parameter, as Pareto sustained. In 1914 C. Gini proposed his famous and statistically and economically well founded income inequality ratio that continues to be the most accepted and applied income inequality index. He also published an important volume on the amount and composition of the wealth of nations, where he analyzed the human and the non-human capital. C. Gini made an outstanding contribution to teaching, research and public service in Italy and the League of Nations, as well as to national and international scientific associations. His exceptional talent to found and to develop new journals, such as Metron and Genus, and academic institutions, such as the Statistical Research Institute at the University of Padova and the University of Rome, followed by the foundation of the excellent and unique Faculty of Statistic, Demographic and Actuarial Sciences at the University of Rome. Since his years as a student of the University of Bologna, C. Gini revealed a truly interdisciplinary interest, including Statistical Methods, Demography, Economics, Econometrics, Sociology, Biology and Philosophy of Sciences. In the XXth Century, characterized by scarce interdisciplinary research, Corrado Gini stood as an eminent renaissance man. 2. Max Otto Lorenz, a year before he was awarded the Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Wisconsin, with a thesis on The Economic Theory of Railroad Rates, wrote a seminal paper on concentration (inequality) of wealth, where he introduced what we know as the Lorenz Curve. Published in 1905, it became a highly influencing paper that inspired further development in probability theory, stochastic dominance and economic analysis. There is almost no theoretical and applied research on income and wealth distributions and on income inequality that is not making use of the remarkable and powerful idea of the Lorenz Curve. M. O. Lorenz was very active in publishing and teaching, and devoted several years to the public service in the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the U.S. Bureau of Railways Economics, the U.S. Bureau of Statistics and the U.S. Institute of Commerce Commission. The scientific research of C. Gini and M. O. Lorenz continue to inspire outstanding theoretical and applied research. The University of Siena organizing this scientific Conference, from Monday, May 23 to Thursday, May 26, 2005, to honor these eminent social scientists by giving a living testimony of the ever presence of their outstanding contributions.
Achille Lemmi
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