"With the focus of international development resources increasingly turned toward poverty reduction, the demand for reliable empirical estimates of poverty levels has grown dramatically... This paper contributes to the poverty measurement literature by introducing an information theoretic...

"The objective of measuring poverty is usually to make comparisons over time or between two or more groups. Common statistical inference methods are used to determine whether an apparent difference in measured poverty is statistically significant. Studies of relative poverty have long recognized...

"The “Cost of Basic Needs” (CBN) approach to drawing consumption-based poverty lines is widely applied and lays credible claim to being the best practice for estimating poverty measures. Unfortunately, a growing mass of evidence indicates that poverty estimates obtained under the CBN...