We assess whether the value of humanity (or global social welfare) has improved in the last decades despite (or because of ) the substantial increase in global population sizes. We use for this purpose a relatively unknown but simple and attractive social evaluation approach based on...

This paper proposes a methodology for testing for whether tax reforms are pro-poor. This is done by extending stochastic dominance techniques to identify tax reforms that will be deemed absolutely or relatively pro-poor by a wide spectrum of poverty analysts. The statistical properties of the...

The evaluation of development processes and of public policies often involves comparisons of social states in which populations differ in size and longevity. This requires social evaluation principles to be sensitive to both the number and the length of lives. This paper explores the use of...

We assess whether the value of humanity (or global social welfare) has improved in the last decades despite (or because of ) the substantial increase in global population sizes. We use for this purpose a relatively unknown but simple and attractive social evaluation approach based on...

The measurement of well-being in its multidimensional aspects has become ever more prominent in monitoring development over the last three decades. This note discusses some of the properties of a recent multidimensional index proposed by the UNDP. Unlike most of its predecessors, UNDP's...

The importance of taking into account multidimensionality in poverty measurement has been recently emphasized. The poverty alleviation literature has not, however, yet addressed the important issue of policy design for efficient multidimensional poverty reduction. From a positive perspective, it...

Income mobility is often thought to equalize permanent incomes and thereby to improvesocial welfare. The welfare analysis of mobility often fails, however, to account for the cost ofthe variability of periodic incomes around permanent incomes. This paper assesses the netwelfare benefit of...

This paper proposes a multidimensional procedure for jointly assessing the absolute and relative pro-poorness of growth. It is also a procedure for testing whether poverty comparisons can be made over classes of indices that incorporate both absolute and relative views of poverty. Besides being...

The paper contributes to the measurement of poverty and vulnerability in three ways. First, we propose a new approach to separating poverty into chronic and transient components. Second, we provide corrections for the statistical biases introduced when using a small number of periods to estimate...

This paper proposes a methodology for testing for whether tax reforms are pro-poor. This is done by extending stochastic dominance techniques to help identify tax reforms that will necessarily be deemed absolutely or relatively pro-poor by a wide spectrum of poverty analysts. The statistical...