An aspect of variable population poverty comparisons

The Economic Journal, 1981

When discussing the state of research on poverty and social security in Britain Atkinson (I977) pointed out that, in measuring the prevalence of poverty, attention has been focused upon the proportion of the population with an income below the poverty line. It is well known that as an index of poverty this has serious shortcomings-in particular, it is insensitive to how far below the poverty line the incomes of the poor fall. Alternative indices have been proposed: the United States Social Security Administration introduced the notion of poverty gaps (see Batchelder (I97I)), that is, the aggregate value of the difference between the incomes of the poor and the poverty line, while Sen (I976) has suggested that income inequality among the poor is also an important dimension of poverty. Atkinson (I977) therefore proposed that researchers experiment with a range of indices which incorporate such aspects of poverty, given the possibility that the measurement of poverty may be sensitive to the precise index employed. Beckerman (I979) has shown that the information content of poverty gaps very usefully supplements that provided by the aggregate incidence approach. However, to our knowledge, there has been no attempt in Britain to compute indices which take account of inequality among the poor. In this paper we hope to correct this omission, and in doing so comments will be offered on some proposed methods of incorporating such a consideration. A close examination of these has prompted us to propose two further indices which, although relying on the setting up of an alternative structure for analysing this problem, are firmly based on the approaches favoured in the existing literature. THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL [JUNE

1984

Journal of European Social Policy, 2006

This work concentrates in the fundamental ideas that constitute the existing theoretical framework of the poverty measurement from the 1960's to the state-of-the-art, with an extended comment on the more relevant issues, the presentation of more influencing approaches and the probable path of future research in Poverty Economics.

1991

We propose a poverty measure that satisfies *a number of properties that make it sensitive to the level of absolute deprivation of the poor. These properties are often violated by several poverty measures discussed in the literature. The measure corresponds to a Cobb-Douglas social welfare function which has a number of egalitarian features.

2000

Social Choice and Welfare, 2006

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 it is important to give both views of poverty-the economist's and the practitioner's-their due.

European Journal of Political Economy, 2002

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.

2012

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2016

The theory of inequality measurement can be founded on a few very simple principles concerning the comparison of income distributions. This chapter discusses the standard principles and the types of inequality indices that follow from them. It shows how these principles and indices can be related to conventional approaches to social-welfare analysis. Adjusting a few pieces within this same framework enables one to derive alternative, novel types of inequality indices and lays the basis for commonly-used types of poverty indices. The chapter also covers other general approaches to distributional comparisons including first-order and second-order dominance and their interpretation in terms of inequality and poverty.

2012

The present paper is a selective overview, very considerably based on work in which the author himself has been involved, of the difficulties which can arise in the measurement of poverty and inequality when one compares populations of differing size. The paper begins with certain problems attending the measurement of poverty when the overall population size is fixed but the numbers of the poor are permitted to vary: one discovers a certain commonality of outcomes between Derek Parfit’s quest for a satisfactory theory of wellbeing and the economist’s quest for a satisfactory measure of poverty. Complications arising from both the poverty and inequality rankings of distributions when the aggregate size of the population is allowed to vary are also investigated. It is suggested in the paper that, from the perspectives of both logical consistency and ethical appeal, there are problems involved in variable population comparisons of poverty and inequality which deserve to be taken note o...

2019

This paper discusses the different approaches to poverty and the many implications following the methods. Poverty is understood dissimilarly according to the approaches and ideally an adequate estimation of poverty requires a combination of approaches. Which target is identified as poor is just as important as the method of carrying out alleviation itself and it makes all the difference from the development perspective. The main agenda of using an approach is to identify target groups. As we shall target groups differ across the different methods but there is also a convergence visibly present. Poverty is finally about measuring deprivation but the parameters of defining the bare minimum shift according to method.

Review of Income and Wealth, 1995

We provide an alternative axiomatization of Sen's (1976) poverty measure. We derive the measure from the general definition of a poverty measure by using a version of Sen's rank order axiom, and a substantially weaker form of his normalization axiom. These two axioms, ...

Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing, 2011

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.