The key challenge in making distributional comparisons with ordinal data is the lack of commensurability of the distances between the ordered categories. This chapter provides a critical review of the most recent theoretical developments addressing this challenge and providing methods for...

The paper discusses the main issues related to negative and zero incomes that are relevant for the measurement of poverty. It shows the prevalence of non-positive incomes in high- and middle-income countries, provides an analysis of the sources and structure of these incomes, outlines the...

Incomes in surveys suffer from various measurement problems, most notably in the tails of their distributions. We study the prevalence of negative and zero incomes, and their implications for inequality and poverty measurement relying on 57 harmonized surveys covering 12 countries over the...

A growing literature uses repeated cross-section surveys to derive 'synthetic panel' data estimates of poverty dynamics statistics. It builds on the pioneering study by Dang, Lanjouw, Luoto, and McKenzie (Journal of Development Economics, 2014) providing bounds estimates and the innovative...

Recent research on Nigeria indicates declining income inequality. In contrast, anecdotal evidence suggests that only the upper class has benefited from economic growth in Nigeria overtime. The disconnect between these findings and anecdotal evidence, and the limitation in how inequality was...

Panel data are rarely available for developing countries. Departing from traditional pseudo-panel methods that require multiple rounds of cross-sectional data to study poverty mobility at the cohort level, we develop a procedure that works with as few as two survey rounds and produces point...

The importance of supermarkets in the world food economy has increased radically since the early 1990s. They are now major sellers and buyers of food items not only in developed but also in developing countries. Urbanization and the liberalization of the services sector have been important...

Whilst traditional food security analysis offers an ex post view on who the food insecure are and why they are so, looking at food insecurity from a vulnerability perspective provides a dynamic and forward looking way of analysing causes and more importantly options for reducing food insecurity....

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...