• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.283-291
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• 2003

The Gini index is one of the most commonly used measures of inequality of income distributions. In this paper, the Lorenz curve is estimated by arcs of two optimal circles, and a new simple method to estimate the Gini index is proposed using the law of cosines. We compare the proposed estimator with the estimator proposed by Ogwang and Rao(1996) in terms of the mean squared error(MSE) though Monte Carlo simulation in a Pareto distribution.