Fiscal policy can change poverty and inequality substantially or slightly depending on the government’s redistributive effort. We develop a diagnostic framework to assess how aligned fiscal policies are with supporting a minimum living standard and human capital accumulation, as well as with...

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...

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 propose a characterisation of an aggregate measure of growth that takes into account the initial economic conditions of individuals. Our measure is a weighted average of individual income growth with weights that are decreasing with the rank of the individual in the initial income...

The aim of this paper is to explain why poverty and material deprivation in South Africa are significantly higher among those of African descent than among whites. To do so, we estimate the conditional levels of poverty and deprivation Africans would experience had they the same characteristics...

A widely accepted criterion for pro-poorness of an income growth pattern is that it should reduce a (chosen) measure of poverty by more than if all incomes were growing equiproportionately. Inequality reduction is not generally seen as either necessary or sufficient for pro-poorness. Because...

We investigate under which conditions it is possible to infer the evolution of poverty at the individual level from the knowledge of poverty among households. Poverty measurement is approached by the poverty orderings introduced by Foster and Shorrocks (1988). The analysis is based on a reduced...

In this paper we make a methodological proposal to measure poverty accounting for time by proposing a new index that aims at reconciling the way poverty is measured in a static and a dynamic framework. Our index is able to consider the duration of the poverty spell and the social preference for...