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...

In this paper, we investigate a dual class of bi-polarization indices, namely rank-dependent bi-polarization indices. We show that these indices may be characterized with the generalized positional transfer sensitivity property. We find necessary and sufficient conditions in order to identify...

This paper extends the previous literature on the normative links between the measurement of poverty, social welfare and inequality. We show how, when the range of possible poverty lines is unbounded above, a robust ranking of absolute poverty may be interpreted as a robust ranking of social...

This paper develops criteria for a new concept of restricted inequality dominance and show how they relate to criteria for comparing relative poverty. The results warn against the use of some popular indices of inequality.\ They do, however, suggest an interesting extension of the Schutz...

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...

A new approach is developed to identify thorough marginal tax reforms for pairs of commodities and to test for the robustness of their impacts on Yaari's dual social welfare functions. S-concentration curves are provided for every order of positional dominance and an illustration is performed...

This note applies tools from the stochastic dominance literature on poverty to environmental data in order to test in a robust way whether over-consumption and thereby depletion of natural resources is increasing over time. \ The method is illustrated with country data on per capita CO_{2}...

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...