This paper proposes an alternative formulation for the Sen-Shorrocks index of poverty intensity for survey data with sampling weights, and decomposes the Sen-Shorrocks index into the poverty rate, the average poverty gap ratio among the poor, and the overall Gini index of poverty gap ratios....

We assemble data from several different sources to examine the cross-national effects of inequality and trust on social expenditures. We find that the inequality between the middle classes and the poor (as measured by the 50/10 percentile ratio) has a small, positive impact but inequality...