The issue of public resource allocation has drawn much attention these years. Generally speaking, there are two main kinds of principles for allocation issues: efficiency and equality. The efficiency principle emphasizes that the allocation work should be based on cost-effectiveness analysis. However, some methods based on efficiency have not taken equality into account, resulting in the fact that some stakeholders refuse to accept the allocation results. Therefore, more and more scholars have focused on developing equality-based approaches for allocation of public resource.
As we all know, the Gini coefficient is a famous indicator to measure the level of inequality. Here, we employed the Gini coefficient to construct an equality-based approach for allocating public resource. In order to test its feasibility, a case study of allocating a public resource (Pollutant discharge permits) to the 13 cities in Jiangsu Province, China is used. The result shows that the approach can achieve equality for the allocation process. This approach can also be applied in allocation of other public resource (e.g., carbon emission allowance, water right quota).