In many countries extreme poverty is unnecessary. Yet it persists. We propose a simple index, denoted the Miser index, to measure the extent to which societies have poverty in the midst of affluence. It builds on the generalized Lorenz curve, but can also be seen as a measure of polarization...

We revisit the link between poverty, the middle class and institutional outcomes using a newly developed cross-country panel dataset containing detailed information on the distribution of income and expenditures. When the size of the middle class increases (measured as the proportion of people...

Using parametric formulae under lognormality for a broad family of povertymeasures, we show that when inequality measured by the Gini coeffcient isconstant, dening the poverty line as a fraction of a central tendency of theliving standard distribution restricts the evolution of the poverty...