Cross-country comparisons of social indicators controlling for income and/or social spending have been widely used to measure and explain "social efficiency," analogously to "technical efficiency" in production. The article argues that these methods are clouded in ambiguities about what is being...

We study the poverty impacts over time and space of Indonesia’s severe economy-wide crisis of 1998, using 10 large national surveys spanning 1993–2002. On allowing for shifts in relative prices stemming from the crisis, we find a sharp but geographically uneven increase in the poverty rate...