Spatial and Social Equity Index for Equity Based Resource Allocation

Equity based resource allocation under budget-constrained schemes always deal with priority targeting. This mechanism requires the use of equity measurement as important input for the decision-making process. Available equity measures such as the Gini Index more focus on equality measurement, which also disregards spatial features. It is therefore insufficient to determine priority setting for spatially targeted intervention policies. This paper aims to propose a new equity-based resources allocation framework. To support this framework we developed formal GIS method for evaluating Spatial and Social Equity. We combined both measures of dispersion and measure of entropy as well as by taking into account geographic features of the location. In specific, the objective of this paper was to investigate the effect of spatial feature in preference modeling for resources allocation to the spatial equity and social equity. Given the possible target-based equity-oriented measures (goal, relative and absolute equity benchmarks), we developed several corresponding mathematical programming formulations for preference modeling. Sensitivity analysis of each formulation to spatial and social equity measures (poverty incident, intensity, prosperity, and equality) explains the effect of spatial features in preference modeling to the social and spatial equity.