There is a growing momentum to base the poverty line on total consumption expenditure as it is a better measure of welfare. This chapter explores three related approaches to measuring household welfare that together represent an alternative ‘inductive’ measuring approach. We focus on...

The paper provides a rigorous derivation of the "welfare triangle approximation" (WTA), which is at the center of cost benefit analysis. The result is generalized by showing that the WTA is one of two dual expressions, one of which approximates the change in real consumption, the other the...