Poverty Intensity- How Well Does Canada Compare? .

The measurement of poverty intensity we use was initially advocated by Sen (1976), and modified recently by Shorrocks (1995). However, since Thon (1979, 1983) proposed arevision of the Sen index which in the limit is identical to that of Shorrocls, we refer henceforth to the SSR index. Section 2 of this article begins by discussing the SST index of poverty intensity and its decomposition into the poverty rate, the average poverty gap ratio among the poor and the overall Gini index of poverty gap ratios. Section 3 discusses the international context for poverty intensity comparisons. Section then looks beneath the national Canadian numbers. Section 5 ranks provinces in terms of poverty intensity.