Journal ArticleDOI
On the measurement of poverty
TLDR
In this paper, the authors re-examine three basic issues in measuring poverty: the choice of the poverty line, the index of poverty, and the relation between poverty and inequality.Abstract:
Official statistics in the United States and the United Kingdom show a rise in poverty between the 1970's and the 1980's but scepticism has been expressed with regard to these findings. In particular, the methods employed in the measurement of poverty have been the subject of criticism. This paper re-examines three basic issues in measuring poverty: the choice of the poverty line, the index of poverty, and the relation between poverty and inequality. One general theme running through the paper is that there is a diversity of judgments which enter the measurement of poverty and that it is necessary to recognize these explicitly in the procedures adopted. There is likely to be disagreement about the choice of poverty line, affecting both its level and its structure. In this situation, we may only be able to make comparisons and not to measure differences, and the comparisons may lead only to a partial rather than a complete ordering. The first section of the paper discusses the stochastic dominance conditions which allow such comparisons, illustrating their application by reference to data for the United States. The choice of poverty measure has been the subject of an extensive literature and a variety of measures have been proposed. In the second section of the paper a different approach is suggested, considering a class of measures satisfying certain general properties and seeking conditions under which all members of the class (which includes many of those proposed) give the same ranking. Those sceptical about measures of poverty often assert that poverty and inequality are being confounded. The third section of the paper distinguishes four different viewpoints and relates them to theories of justice and views of social welfare.read more
Citations
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Posted Content
Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Measurement
Sabina Alkire,James E. Foster +1 more
TL;DR: This paper proposed a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of an identification method ρk that extends the traditional intersection and union approaches, and a class of poverty measures Mα.
Journal ArticleDOI
How important to India's poor is the sectoral composition of economic growth?
Martin Ravallion,Gaurav Datt +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors assess how much India's poor shared in the country's economic growth, taking into account its urban-rural and output composition, and find that output growth in the primary and tertiary sectors reduced poverty in both urban and rural areas but that secondary sector growth did not reduce poverty in either.
Journal ArticleDOI
Counting and multidimensional poverty measurement
TL;DR: The authors proposed a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of an identification method ρk that extends the traditional intersection and union approaches, and a class of poverty measures Mα.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Developing World is Poorer than We Thought, But No Less Successful in the Fight Against Poverty
Shaohua Chen,Martin Ravallion +1 more
TL;DR: A new data set on national poverty lines is combined with new price data and almost 700 household surveys to estimate absolute poverty measures for the developing world as discussed by the authors, finding that 25% of the population lived in poverty in 2005.
Posted Content
Implications of Higher Global Food Prices for Poverty in Low-Income Countries
Maros Ivanic,Will Martin +1 more
TL;DR: The authors showed that the short-run impacts of higher staple food prices on poverty differ considerably by commodity and by country, but, that poverty increases are much more frequent, and larger, than poverty reductions.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
A Class of Decomposable Poverty Measures
Journal ArticleDOI
On the Measurement of Inequality
TL;DR: In this paper, the problem of comparing two frequency distributions f(u) of an attribute y which for convenience I shall refer to as income is defined as a risk in the theory of decision-making under uncertainty.
Book
On Economic Inequality
Amartya Sen,James E. Foster +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, Amartya Sen relates the theory of welfare economics to the study of economic inequality and presents a systematic treatment of the conceptual framework as well as the practical problems of measurement of inequality.
Journal ArticleDOI
Poverty: An Ordinal Approach to Measurement
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors proposed a new measure of poverty, which should avoid some of the shortcomings of the measures currently in use, and used an axiomatic approach to derive the measure.