The targeting efficiency and the coverage of social programs for the poor are typically analyzed by partitioning the total population in four mutually exclusive groups: the poor who benefit from a program or policy, the poor who do not benefit, the non-poor who benefit, and the non-poor who do...

Variations in aggregate poverty indices can be due to differences in average poverty intensity, to changes in the welfare distances between those poor of initially unequal welfare status and/or to emerging disparities in welfare among those poor of initially similar welfare status. This note...

The paper proposes an indicator of the performance of a tax and benefit system in generating a high level of social welfare. Under standard assumptions on the form of the admissible social welfare functions, the indicator is shown to be increasing in the progressivity of the system. Using UK...