PRACTICAL APPLICATION

Question # 02: Practical Application

Question # 02: Practical Application

Here, in this assignment, I would discuss some issues and then evaluate the implication of different theories.

Spatial Inequality

The study of inequality seeks to analyze the causes, contexts, conditions, and outcomes of disparities between two or more groups over a given number of variables. It differs from a study of difference insofar as the former assumes a quantifiable progression from worse off to better off in some respects relevant to the human sciences. Inequality is most commonly explained with reference to genetic predisposition, individual action, and social forces, or some combination of the three that leads to disparities between two or more unequal individuals or groups. The means of quantifying inequality are often quite sophisticated and are consistently used to analyze the development of a given group relative to its own past and relative to the situation of others within a specific time frame(Milanovic ,2006).

Spatial inequality is a particular form of inequality. Inequality is more generally the study of “who gets what and why.” Adding a spatial characteristic means integrating an element of “where,” enriching the concept by seeking to explain how social, political, economic, and cultural discrepancies relate not only to ideas, structure, and agency but also to the specific attributes of space in the material world. Spatial inequality is a concept that seeks to explain and illustrate discrepancies among populations regarding outcomes, conditions, and/or opportunities across different spaces and spatial scales. It shows inequality in terms of different spatially located demographics and their relationship to a given set of variables.

Spatial inequality occurs for a number of reasons, including the formation and operation of class; racism and/or prejudice toward cultural, ethnic, or minority groups; and other discriminative views and practices (e.g., based on gender, religion, age, or sexuality). Equally important, however, is a clustering among socioeconomic lines, which is a general feature of spatial inequality. Figure 1 shows the level of intra- and inter-country economic disparity among four countries. Economic disparities are a useful and common way of measuring inequality. The graphic shows that while Brazil's richest people are as rich as those of France, its poorest are poorer than the poorest in rural Indonesia. Clearly, this kind of analysis is useful in understanding the massive discrepancies on two different spatial scales, in this case national and global.

Spatial inequality can also be considered in terms of the unequal distribution in goods or services depending on an area or location. Inequality in services, for instance, means that the provision of medical aid or education will differ among spaces. Figure 2 shows the results of a study that found a correlation between nonattendance rates and school densities in counties in Gansu province, China. The map shows that counties with a relatively weak density of lower-secondary schools have a higher girls' non-schooling rate than counties with high densities of lower-secondary schools. This study demonstrates that the longer the distance from schools, the higher the opportunity cost of acquiring education and the greater the gender disparities ...