The evaluation of development processes and of public policies often involves comparisons of social states that differ in income distributions, population sizes and life longevity. This may require social evaluation principles to be sensitive to the quality, the quantity and the duration of...

This paper analyzes the impact of a recent recommendation made by Quebec's Comité consultatif de lutte contre la pauvreté et l'exclusion sociale to guarantee every individual an income equal to 80% of Statistics Canada's Market Basket Measure (MBM). Workers with earnings at least equivalent to...

The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty ranking across...

We derive the asymptotic sampling distribution of various estimators frequently used to order distributions in terms of poverty, welfare and inequality. This includes estimators of most of the poverty indices currently in use, as well as estimators of the curves used to infer stochastic...

Just as the Gini inequality index captures people's relative deprivation [Yitzhaki (1979)], so, we show in this paper, Gini-based progressivity and horizontal inequity indices capture individual perceptions of relative fiscal harshness and ill-fortune. In fact, we find that these links between...

Just as the Gini inequality index captures people's relative deprivation [Yitzhaki (1979)], so, we show in this paper, Gini-based progressivity and horizontal inequity indices capture individual perceptions of relative fiscal harshness and ill-fortune. In fact, we find that these links between...

The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across...