Social programmes for poverty alleviation involve eligibility rules and transfer rules that often proxy-means tests. We propose to specify the estimator in connection with the poverty alleviation problem. Three distinct stages emerge from the optimization analysis: the identification of the...

Little attention has been devoted to the effects of price dispersion at local and seasonal levels on the measurement of living standards in LDCs. In particular, it is not known if a substantial share of welfare or poverty is the consequence of price differences rather than of differences in...