Putting the combat against poverty to the fore as the main objective of the development process has raised the issue of the linkage between economic growth, inequality and poverty. There is now a growing agreement that both the rate and the distributional impact of growth are important in...

Assessing whether distributional changes are "pro-poor" has become increasingly widespread in academic and policy circles. Starting from relatively general ethical axioms, this paper proposes simple graphical methods to test whether distributional changes are indeed pro-poor. Pro-poor standards...

Is horizontal equity (HE) the "most widely accepted principle of equity"? Or does it stand in "opposition to the advancement of human welfare"? This paper argues that the case for the HE principle is not as straightforward as is usually thought and that it requires advanced notions of justice...

We investigate spatial poverty comparisons in three African countries using multidimensional indicators of well-being. The work is analogous to the univariate stochastic dominance literature in that we seek poverty orderings that are robust to the choice of multidimensional poverty lines and...

This paper provides a method to make robust multidimensional poverty comparisons when one or more of the dimensions of well-being or deprivation is discrete. Sampling distributions for the statistics used in these poverty comparisons are provided. Several examples show that the methods are both...

We propose simple graphical methods to identify poverty-reducing transfer program reforms. The methods are based on Program Dominance curves that display cumulative program benefits weighted by powers of poverty gaps. These curves can be decomposed simply as sums of targeting dominance curves...

Using a large sample of US urban areas, we provide systematic evidence that mean household income rises with city ('agglomeration'), that this effect is stronger for the top of the income distribution ('polarization'), and that household income inequality increases at a decreasing rate in city...

This paper proposes tests for stochastic dominance in mobility based on the empirical likelihood ratio. Two views of mobility are considered, either based on measures of absolute mobility or on transition matrices. First-order and second-order dominance conditions in mobility are first derived,...

Ce papier estime la contribution des principales sources de revenu ainsi que des principaux impôts, taxes de vente et transferts aux particuliers à l’allégement de la pauvreté au Québec et au Canada. Cette contribution est départagée en un produit de la taille de ces sources et de leur...