The poverty impact of indirect tax reforms is analyzed using sequential stochastic dominance methods. This allows agents to differ in dimensions that cannot always be precisely captured within the usual money-metric indicators of living standards. Examples of such dimensions include household...

We propose simple graphical methods to identify poverty-reducing marginal reforms of transfer programs. The methods are based on Program Dominance curves that display cumulative program benefits weighted by powers of poverty gaps. These curves can be decomposed simply as sums of targeting...

The poverty impact of indirect tax reforms is analyzed using sequential stochastic dominance methods. This allows agents to differ in dimensions that cannot always be precisely captured within the usual money-metric indicators of living standards. Examples of such dimensions include household...

The evaluation of the impact on poverty of social programs depends on how other programs are treated in the analysis and on the assumptions used for estimating poverty measures. This paper applies a simple yet sound method for allocating between various programs the total poverty reduction...

Commodity producers in Africa often bene?t from guaranteed and relatively stable prices for their crops. This paper shows how to estimate the required increase in crop price necessary to o¤set the higher risk for farmers that price liberalization would entail due to large variations over time...

This paper extends familiar results on the optimal pricing of publicly provided goods and price cap regulations in a stochastic dominance framework. The key advantage is that the assessment as to whether pricing or price cap reforms are poverty reducing or welfare improving is not contingent on...

A method is proposed to provide robust poverty comparisons and robust evaluations of marginal policy reforms under income variability. Given that a household’s certainty equivalent income depends on both expected income and income variability, stochastic dominance tests are developed in order...

This paper shows how to take into account risk aversion when measuring poverty under income variability. An application to British panel data suggests that income and poverty comparisons between the self-employed and other groups of households are sensitive to assumptions on the degree of risk...

The evaluation of the poverty impact and targeting performance of a given social program may depend on how other programs are treated in the analysis.Using well-known results from cooperative game theory, this paper proposes an empirically simple yet theoretically sound method for allocating...

This paper proposes graphical methods to determine whether commodity-tax changes are "socially improving", in the sense of improving social welfare or decreasing poverty for large classes of social welfare and poverty indices. It also derives estimators of critical poverty lines and economic...