Population growth and poverty measurement

2002

If the absolute number of poor people goes up, but the fraction of people in poverty comes down, has poverty gone up or gone down? The economist’s instinct, framed by population replication axioms that undergird standard measures of poverty, is to say that in this case poverty has gone down. But this goes against the instinct of those who work directly with the poor, for whom the absolute numbers notion makes more sense as they cope with more poor on the streets or in the soup kitchens. This paper attempts to put these two conceptions of poverty into a common framework. Specifically, it presents an axiomatic development of a family of poverty measures without a population replication axiom. This family has an intuitive link to standard measures, but it also allows one or other of “the absolute numbers” or the “fraction in poverty” conception to be given greater weight by the choice of relevant parameters. We hope that this family will prove useful in empirical and policy work where ...

2018

NCDS Working Paper 71, 2018

Since the 1976 seminal paper by Amartya Sen on axiomatic characterization of poverty measure, researchers have come out with poverty measures with better properties than the simplest measure, the head count ratio (HCR). However, attempt to substitute the HCR has not succeeded given that the HCR remains till date as the dominant headline indicator in policy, media, and political discourse, and for public at large. This note argues that the part of the problem lies in the fundamental intension to ‘substitute’ the HCR with better indicators. We propose to depart from this conventional approach in indicator research and attempt for indicators which could complement. This approach can lead to having measures exclusively for the poor complimenting the overall poverty measures that are meant for the entire population. The note shows indicators like Income gap ratio, which fails on most counts as an overall poverty measure, turns out to be a fairly good measure of poverty of the poor.

Journal of Development Economics, 2012

Journal of Economics and Sustainable Development, 2013

The focus of the international community on poverty reduction has been gaining momentum since the early 1990s. The World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen (2005) and the subsequent Millennium Summit in New York (2000) provided considerable political will for the reduction of poverty. The debate has been how a multi-dimensional subject like poverty can be measured statistically. Should we continue the single measure using consumption or accept a composite measure; and how would this measure be amenable to quantitative manipulation. This paper traced this methodological debate and offers the contribution that the intensity of poverty can be better measured using a composite income or expenditure metrics that captures expenditure on the individual's basic necessities of life such as food, health, clothing shelter, education etc. This is because changes in income or expenditure have multiplier effects that influence all aspects of the quality of human life, both at the micro and macro levels. Many of the known indices of poverty, such as those mentioned above, are directly or indirectly dependent on income. Even qualitative indicators such as dignity, power and security are better assured to people with higher income to spare.

2012

2004

The objective of this paper is to review a number of issues related to poverty, while taking stock of the ongoing research. Most of the remaining unresolved issues in poverty analysis are related directly or indirectly to the dynamics of poverty. Before the development community can become more successful in designing and implementing poverty-alleviation strategies, within the context of growth, we need to understand better the conditions under which some households remain permanently (chronically) poor and how others move in and out of poverty. In what follows we review the state of the art under a number of interrelated headings: (1) Chronic vs. transient poverty;

en.scientificcommons.org

IVIE working papers offer in advance the results of economic research under way in order to encourage a discussion process before sending them to scientific journals for their final publication.

2009

1996

The aim of this paper is twofold. The first is to illustrate that a poverty index can be derived from a decomposition of an appropriate inequality index. The advantage of decomposing an inequality index is that the decomposition supplies additional information that is useful for poverty measurement. The second purpose is to illustrate the kind of policy analysis that can be performed with a decomposed inequality index by decomposing the Gini coefficient into Sen's poverty index and other components. The methodology suggests an answer to the following question: Assume that a tax has been imposed on an expenditure item or an income source, what will be the impact on the components of the inequality index? The analysis is performed with data from Romania. D 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. 0176-2680/02/$ -see front matter D 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. PII: S 0 1 7 6 -2 6 8 0 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 6 9 -6 www.elsevier.com/locate/econbase *