This paper measures the vulnerability of households in rural India, based upon the ICRISAT panel survey. We employ both ex ante and ex post measures of vulnerability. The latter are decomposed into aggregate and idiosyncratic risks and poverty components. Our decomposition shows that...

This paper describes changes over the past 15-20 years in non-income measures of wellbeing—education and health—in Africa. We expected to find, as we did in Latin America, that progress in the provision of public services and the focus of public spending in the social sector would contribute...

The literature on the economics of happiness in the developed economies finds discrepancies between reported measures of wellbeing and income measures. The ‘Easterlin paradox’, for example, shows that average happiness levels do not increase as countries grow wealthier. This article explores...

In a heterogeneous population which can be partitioned into well-defined subgroups, it is plausible that the extent of measured aggregate poverty should depend upon the distribution of poverty across the subgroups. A judgment in favour of an equal inter-group distribution of poverty could arise...

Before effective anti-poverty policy can be designed and implemented, the extent, trend and distribution of poverty must be identified. In this sense, poverty measurement is a crucial intermediate step in public policymaking and development planning. This paper asks whether the estimated...

This note points to certain similarities of orientation and outcome between Derek Parfit’s quest for a theory of beneficence and Amartya Sen’s quest for a suitable realvalued representation of poverty. It suggests that both projects, in a certain sense, have been instructive failures. Using...

Food security is a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon. As such, its measurement may entail and benefit from the combination of both ‘qualitative-subjective’ and ‘quantitative-objective’ indicators. Yet, the evidence on the external validity of subjectivetype information is scarce,...

This paper points to some elementary conflicts between the claims of interpersonal and intergroup justice as they manifest themselves in the process of seeking a real-valued index of poverty which is required to satisfy certain seemingly desirable properties. It indicates how...

In this study, we combined the Cambodian socioeconomic survey for 1997 and the country’s population census of 1998 to produce poverty measures at the commune-level in Cambodia using the small-area estimation technique developed by Elbers, Lanjouw and Lanjouw. While there are a number of...

If uncertainty exists over the exact location of the poverty line or over which measure to use to compare poverty between distributions, one may want to check whether poverty dominance holds. We develop a consistent statistical test to test the null of poverty dominance against the alternative...