[Shoue]

Relative measures are important because it's an indicator of how fairly domestic resources are being allocated. You can be a poor country but have resources fairly allocated among the population, and you can be a rich country and have resources unfairly allocated among the population. It's a good indicator of how well people at the bottom are being taken care of, and the ideal scenario is a rich country with low income inequality, which the Nordic countries are probably the best examples of.

You can use measures that are less country-specific like the Gini coefficient and UN R/P to measure domestic inequality between countries:

The UK has a Gini coefficient of 35.1, a UN R/P 10% of 13.8

India has a Gini coefficient of 35.7, a UN R/P 10% of 8.6

For reference, Norway has a Gini coefficient of 27.7, and a UN R/P 10% of 6.1

(higher = more inequality)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

[Neil44]

That is very interesting. But I think the answer to the parents question about why people are not boarding rubber dinghies from the UK to India is that in absolute terms poverty is not the same in the two countries.