Drawing on recent work concerning the statistical robustness of inequality statistics we examine the sensitivity of poverty indices to data contamination using the concept of the influence function. We show that poverty and inequality indices have fundamentally different robustness properties,...

We re-examine some of the standard axioms used in the literature on Poverty Measurement. Using a sample of 486 students from Australia, Israel and the USA we investigate the extent to which perceptions of poverty correspond to the axioms.

We consider the problem of targeting benefits when the incomes of families are not accurately observable by the public authorities. By income uncertainty it is meant that the decision-maker cannot ascertain an applicant's income, but that he can assign probabilities with respect to the level of...

This paper documents the impact of Argentina's recent economic crises on different aspects of poverty, with a special focus on the economic collapse of 2002. We discuss the methodology of poverty measurement in Argentina and we use a simple rule to compensate for the lack of regional poverty...

The standard approach to the study of poverty assumes the existence of an ideal variable that captures the extent of deprivation. In this paper we postulate that poverty is involved with many dimensions. We use a latent variable framework to predict the extent of an individual's hardship as a...

The second-order stochastic dominance criterion for inequality analysis introduced by Atkinson (1970) covers nearly all well-known inequality indices. The same cannot be said, in respect of poverty indices, for the second-order stochastic dominance criterion for poverty analysis introduced by...