We examine the measurement of individual poverty in an intertemporal context. Our aim is to capture the importance of persistence in a state of poverty and we characterize a corresponding individual intertemporal poverty measure. Our first axiom requires that intertemporal poverty is identical...

An index of richness in a society is a measure of the extent of its affluence. This paper presents an analytical discussion on several indices of richness and their properties. It also develops criteria for ordering alternative distributions of income in terms of their richness. Given a line of...