This paper is a review and commentary, from both ethical and informational perspectives, of some known results in optimal anti-poverty budgetary rules for two kinds of intervention, direct income transfers and wage employment programmes.

This note advances a family of poverty measures, ??, which are derived as simple, normalized Minkowski distance functions. The ?? indices turn out to be the ?th roots of the corresponding Foster, Greer and Thorbecke P? indices. The re-calibration of P? terms of ?? could have certain possible...

This essay aims at a broad, main-stream account of the literature on inequality and poverty measurement in the space of income and, additionally, deals with measures of disparity and deprivation in the more expanded domain of capabilities and functionings. In addition to an introductory and a...

This paper reviews the principal source of India’s wealth distribution statistics, which is constituted by the five decennial Reserve Bank of India National Sample Survey Organization Surveys on Debt and Investment of 1961-62, 1971-72, 1981-82, 1991-92, and 2002-03. The data available are...

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...

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...

This paper re-asserts the importance of certain old-fashioned questions relating to international aid: what is the quantum of aid available in relation to the need for it? How may patterns of allocation, at both the dispensing and receiving ends of aid, be determined so as to take account of...

This paper explores the hypothesis that the phenomenon of child labour is explicable in terms of poverty that compels a household to keep its children out of school and put them to work in the cause of the household’s survival. In exploring the link between child labour and poverty in the...

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...