While many of the measurement approaches in health inequality measurement assume the existence of a ratio-scale variable,most of the health information available in population surveys is given in the form of categorical variables. Therefore, the well-known inequality indices may not always be...

While many of the measurement approaches in health inequality measurement assume the existence of a ratio-scale variable, most of the health information available in population surveys is given in the form of categorical variables. Therefore, the well-known inequality indices may not always be...

This paper uses a fuzzy-fuzzy stochastic dominance approach to compare patients’ leakages in the Canadian and the U.S. health care systems. Leakages are defined in terms of individuals who are in bad health and could not have access to health care when needed. To carry his comparison we rely...

When comparing poverty across distributions, an analyst must select a poverty line to idendify the poor, an equivalence scale to compare individuals from households of different compositions and sizes, and a poverty index to aggregate individual deprivation into an index of total poverty. A...

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...

This paper proposes techniques to test for whether growth has been pro-poor. We first review different definitions of pro-poorness and argue for the use of methods that can generate results that are robust over classes of pro-poor measures and ranges of poverty lines. We then provide statistical...

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...

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...

We propose simple graphical methods to identify poverty-reducing transfer program reforms. 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 dominance curves...

This paper extends the previous literature on the ethical links between the measurement of poverty, social welfare and inequality. We show inter alia, 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...