This paper refers to the ranking of densities that describe the distribution of an attribute in a given set of populations. The key elements of the problem are: (i) The distributions refer to ordered categorical data (e.g. health statuses, educational achievements, prestige positions,...

This paper provides a discussion on the empirical findings surrounding the design of human development, inequality and poverty measures. We focus on the United Nations Development Program approach to those issues, in particular regarding the human development index and the multidimensional...

This paper is devoted to the discussion of the measurement of human development and poverty, especially in United Nations Development Program’s global Human Development Reports. We first outline the methodological evolution of different indices over the last two decades, focusing on the...

This paper proposes a mechanism to overcome the possibility that political parties may block the nomination of High-Court judges when the Parliament is involved in their nomination and their mandate expires on a fixed date. This possibility arises when the default option is that the judge whose...

This paper provides a criterion to evaluate the overall performance of a given number of groups whose members can be of different types, out of the analysis of their relative frequencies. Assuming that types can be ordered from best to worse, the starting point is that of dominance relations in...

This paper provides an approach to poverty measurement that relies on the interpretation of poverty as a welfare loss. Our contribution is twofold. On the one hand, we analyse the relationship between individual and aggregate indicators, by introducing the notion of “distributive impact of...

This paper proposes a multidimensional index that summarizes three relevant aspects of the educational achievements, out of the data provided by the PISA Report, concerning reading abilities of 15-year-old students of 65 countries. The three aspects considered are: performance, equity, and...

We present here a multidimensional poverty index that measures poverty as a function of the extent and the intensity of poverty. Extent is given by the share of the poor in the population. To measure intensity we start by defining individual unidimensional deprivation indices (one for each...

This paper provides an elementary characterization of a family of multi-dimensional development indices that allows introducing distributive considerations. It consists of the generalized mean of the egalitarian equivalent values of the different dimensions. The key property that defines that...

This paper presents a measure of social discrimination based on the principle of equality of opportunity. According to this principle we only have to care about the inequality derived from people’s differential circumstances (and not about outcome differences due to people’s diverse degree...