Debates about poverty relief and foreign aid often hinge on claims about how many poor people there are in the world and what constitutes poverty. Good measures of poverty are essential for addressing the world poverty problem. Measures of poverty require a basis for determining who is poor and...

A natural way of viewing an inequality or a poverty measure is in terms of the vector distance between an actual (empirical) distribution of incomes and some appropriately normative distribution (reflecting a perfectly equal distribution of incomes, or a

This paper is a review and commentary, from both ethical and informational perspectives, of some known results in optimal anti-poverty budgetary rules for two kinds of intervention, direct income transfers and wage employment programmes.

This essay aims at a broad, main-stream account of the literature on inequality and poverty measurement in the space of income and, additionally, deals with measures of disparity and deprivation in the more expanded domain of capabilities and functionings. In addition to an introductory and a...

This paper points to some elementary conflicts between the claims of interpersonal and intergroup justice as they manifest themselves in the process of seeking a real-valued index of poverty which is required to satisfy certain seemingly desirable properties. It indicates how ?group-sensitive?...

The present paper is a selective overview, very considerably based on work in which the author himself has been involved, of the difficulties which can arise in the measurement of poverty and inequality when one compares populations of differing size. The

Debates about poverty relief and foreign aid often hinge on claims about how many poor people there are in the world and what constitutes poverty. Good measures of poverty are essential for addressing the world poverty problem. Measures of poverty require a basis for determining who is poor and...

Bourguignon and Fields ("Poverty Measures and Anti-Poverty Policy") and Gangopadhyay and Subramanian ("Optimal Budgetary Intervention in Poverty Alleviation Schemes") have derived optimal budgetary rules for the redress of poverty through direct income transfers when poverty is measured by the...