We describe the problem of the equivalence of ensembles at the level of states for classical lattice systems. We discuss circumstances where the vanishing of the specific information gain of a sequence of microcanonical measures with respect to a sequence of grand canonical measures implies the equivalence of ensembles. We give a simple derivation of a criterion for the vanishing of the specific information gain in terms of thermodynamic functions. The proof uses ideas from the theory of large deviations but is self-contained. We show how the criterion works in a simple model of a paramagnet and in the Ising model of a ferromagnet in any dimension but fails in the case of the Curie-Weiss mean-field model.