The paper contributes to the measurement of poverty and vulnerability in three ways. First, we propose a new approach to separating poverty into chronic and transient components. Second, we provide corrections for the statistical biases introduced when using a small number of periods to estimate...

Poverty rates among households with children in Spain have been shown to be persistently higher than those among households without children. These higher rates prevail for chronic, transitory and, most remarkably, for recurrent poverty. In order to study the dynamics of poverty transitions in...

From 1992 to 2001, despite its rapid economic growth during the early 1990s, Argentina experienced a period characterized by increasing income inequality and poverty. An axiomatically modified Datt-Ravallion decomposition, that separates changes in poverty rates into mean and inequality...

This paper identifies a multiplicative decomposition for the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty indices as a product of the three components which should be involved in every poverty index: the incidence of poverty, measured by the headcount ratio, the intensity of poverty, measured by the aggregate...

This paper investigates the influence of invariance axioms in the decomposition of observed poverty variations into growth and inequality effects. After a complete and critical review of the invariance axioms suggested in the literature, we show that few information is needed for the ordering of...

Households can differ in size and needs. A reliable assessment of inequality in living standards, therefore, necessitates the conversion of the original heterogeneous into an artificial quasi-homogeneous population. Ebert and Moyes (2003) and Shorrocks (2004) theoretically explore the properties...

This paper is concerned with the measurement of the extent of deprivation when the available information is given by a set of dichotomous variables, and the data are summarised by the count distribution, i.e. the distribution of the number of dimensions in which an individual suffers from...

We consider the classical inequality measures due to Gini, Bonferroni, and De Vergottini and we present a brief review of the three inequality indices and the associated welfare functions, in the correspondence scheme introduced by Blackorby and Donaldson, and Weymark. The three classical...

Building on earlier work by political philosophers, economists have recently sought to define a concept of equity that accommodates the fairness of reward to individual responsibility and effort, while allowing for the existence of some inequalities which are unfair and should be compensated....

We investigate the relationship between growth and deprivation in India, an issue of immense interest. Given the continuing controversy in India over poverty lines, we use a framework that rigorously assesses the impact of growth on the poor over a range of poverty lines. Using National Sample...