Households in developing countries adopt livelihood strategies that often rely on income from a diversity of sources. From a policy perspective it therefore becomes important to understand the relative importance of income sources in driving inter-household inequality and poverty.

The objective of the present paper is to compare schemes using a welfare function that reflects concern for both poverty and inequality.

A social development perspective is used to seek an answer to the question: why is the incidence of absolute poverty so different among developing countries in East Asia, South Asia and Latin America?

If poverty and nutrition are issues also of social justice and the commitment that a democratic state makes to its citizens (namely, ridding the country of hunger and malnutrition and also of ensuring food security) then the discipline of economics needs to pose its problem differently. The...