We propose simple graphical methods to identify poverty-reducing marginal reforms of transfer programs. The methods are based on Program Dominance curves that display cumulative program benefits weighted by powers of poverty gaps. These curves can be decomposed simply as sums of targeting...

The poverty impact of indirect tax reforms is analyzed using sequential stochastic dominance methods. This allows agents to differ in dimensions that cannot always be precisely captured within the usual money-metric indicators of living standards. Examples of such dimensions include household...

This paper extends the previous literature on the normative links between the measurement of poverty, social welfare and inequality. We show how, when the range of possible poverty lines is unbounded above, a robust ranking of absolute poverty may be interpreted as a robust ranking of social...

This paper develops criteria for a new concept of restricted inequality dominance and show how they relate to criteria for comparing relative poverty. The results warn against the use of some popular indices of inequality.\ They do, however, suggest an interesting extension of the Schutz...

This paper proposes graphical methods to determine whether commodity-tax changes are socially improving , in the sense of improving social welfare or decreasing poverty for large classes of social welfare and poverty indices. It also derives estimators of critical poverty lines and economic...

This paper shows how to take into account risk aversion when measuring poverty under income variability. An application to British panel data suggests that income and poverty comparisons between the self-employed and other groups of households are sensitive to assumptions on the degree of risk...

In this article, we analyze how various historical modifications to welfare and old age pensions programs have affected poverty in Canada.

To better understand the geographic determinants of poverty in Albania, this article proposes a methodology similar to that developed by Ravallion and Wodon (1999). Our methodology’s main contribution resides within how we utilize the entirety of a household’s joint distribution of...

This paper extends familiar results on the optimal pricing of publicly provided goods and price cap regulations in a stochastic dominance framework. The key advantage is that the assessment as to whether pricing or price cap reforms are poverty reducing or welfare improving is not contingent on...

In this paper, we propose the conception of Within-group Consumption-Dominance Curves in order to capture the impact of indirect tax reforms on poverty. Considering that the population is partitioned into many groups, which differ in needs, in health, in capability or other attributes, we...