Building upon the cost of basic needs (CBN) approach, an integrated approach to making consumption-based poverty comparisons is presented. This approach contains two principal modifications to the standard CBN approach. The first permits the development of multiple poverty bundles that are...

A fundamental premise of absolute poverty lines is that they represent the same level of utility through time and space. Disturbingly, a series of recent studies in middle- and low-income economies show that even carefully derived poverty lines rarely satisfy this premise. This article proposes...

Using 1996-97 and 2002-03 nationally representative household surveys, we examine the extent to which growth in Mozambique has been pro-poor. While all sections of society enjoyed a rapid annual increase in consumption between the sample periods, the rate of growth in consumption was slightly...

The "Cost of Basic Needs" (CBN) approach to drawing consumption-based poverty lines is widely applied and lays credible claim to being the best practice for estimating poverty measures. Unfortunately, a growing mass of evidence indicates that poverty estimates obtained under the CBN approach are...

The objective of measuring poverty is usually to make comparisons over time or between two or more groups. Common statistical inference methods are used to determine whether an apparent difference in measured poverty is statistically significant. Studies of relative poverty have long recognized...