The effect of taxes and benefits on the poor is usually measured using standard poverty and inequality indicators, stochastic dominance tests, and measures of progressivity and horizontal inequity. However, these measures can fail to capture an important aspect: that some of the poor are made...

This paper presents a methodology to measure vulnerability to asset-poverty. Using repeated cross-section data, age cohort decomposition techniques focusing on second-order moments can be used to identify and estimate the variance of shocks on assets and, therefore, the probability of being poor...

This paper proposes a new methodology to test for whether indirect tax reforms are pro-poor. The methodology extends stochastic dominance techniques and enables identifying tax reforms that will necessarily be deemed absolutely or relatively pro-poor by a wide spectrum of poverty analysts. The...

After decades of stagnation and economic decline coupled with political upheavals, the Republic of Haiti is today the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest in the world. The present research reveals that this country is also where income is worst distributed in the most...

Twenty-five years ago, the FGT class of decomposable poverty measures was introduced in Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke [54]. The present study provides a retrospective view of the FGT paper and the subsequent literature, as well as a brief discussion of future directions. We identify three...

The paper reviews the theory of the measurement of poverty. The axiomatic theory is described and the axiomatic properties of poverty indexes are related to assumptions on the functional form of the poverty index function. The notion of poverty ordering is then introduced and followed by a...

This paper is a review of recent developments of parametric and non-parametric approaches to decompose inequality by subgroups, income sources, causal factors and other unit characteristics. Different methods of decomposing changes in poverty into growth, redistribution, poverty standard and...

This paper focuses on the importance data issues to the analysis of growth, poverty and economic inequality. We introduce a number of major databases frequently used in applied research on growth, poverty and global and international inequality. A discussion of data quality, data consistency,...

In Mexico, as in most Latin American countries with indigenous populations, it is commonly believed that European phenotypes are preferred to mestizo or indigenous phenotypes. However, it is hard to test for such racial biases in the labor market using official statistics since race can only be...

This paper focuses on the importance data issues to the analysis of growth, poverty and economic inequality. We introduce a number of major databases frequently used in applied research on growth, poverty and global and international inequality. A discussion of data quality, data consistency,...