A Simple Axiomatization of the Foster, Greer and Thorbecke Poverty Orderings (original) (raw)
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We examine the conditions under which unanimous poverty rankings of income distributions can be obtained for a general class of poverty indices. The "per-capita income gap" and the Shorrocks and Thon poverty measures are particular members of this class. The conditions of dominance are stated in terms of comparisons of the corresponding TIP curves and areas.
An Alternative Axiomatization of Sen's Poverty Measure
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, ...
Counting poverty orderings and deprivation curves
2009
Most of the data available for measuring capabilities or dimensions of poverty is either ordinal or categorical. However, the majority of the indices introduced for the assessment of multidimensional poverty behave well only with cardinal variables. The counting approach introduced by Atkinson (2003) concentrates on the number of dimensions in which each person is deprived, and is an appropriate procedure that deals well with ordinal and categorical variables. A method to identify the poor and a number of poverty indices has been proposed taking this framework into account. However, the implementation of this methodology involves the choice of a minimum number of deprivations required in order to be identified as poor. This cutoff adds arbitrariness to poverty comparisons. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we explore properties which allow us to characterize the identification method as the most appropriate procedure to identify the poor in a multidimensional setting. Then the paper examines dominance conditions in order to guarantee unanimous poverty rankings in a counting framework. Our conditions are based on simple graphical devices that provide a tool for checking the robustness of poverty rankings to changes in the identification cutoff , and also for checking unanimous orderings in a wide set of multidimensional poverty indices that suit ordinal and categorical data.
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.
Inequality and Poverty Measures
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.
Restricted and Unrestricted Dominance for Welfare, Inequality and Poverty Orderings
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2003
This paper extends the previous literature on the ethical links between the measurement of poverty, social welfare and inequality. We show inter alia, how, when the range of possible poverty lines is unbounded above, a robust ranking of absolute poverty may be interpreted as a robust ranking of social welfare, and a robust ranking of relative poverty may be interpreted as a robust ranking of inequality, and this, for any order of stochastic dominance.
Multidimensional Poverty Orderings
This paper generalizes the poverty ordering criteria available for one-dimensional income poverty to the case of multi-dimensional welfare attributes. A set of properties to be satisfied by multidimensional poverty measures is first discussed. Then general classes of poverty measures based on these properties are defined. Finally, dominance criteria are derived such that a distribution of multi-dimensional attributes exhibits less poverty than another for all multi-dimensional poverty indices belonging to a given class . These criteria may be seen as a generalization of the single dimension poverty-line criterion. However, it turns out that the way this generalization is made depends on whether attributes are complements or substitutes.
On Indices for the Measurement of Poverty
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