Poverty and mortality are arguably the two major sources of loss of well-being. Most mainstream measures of human development capturing these two dimensions aggregate them in an ad-hoc and controversial way. This paper develops a new index aggregating the poverty and the mortality observed in a...

Multidimensional poverty measures are increasingly used in practice even though they face strong criticism and generate longlasting debates. These contentions primarily find their origin in the divergence between standard poverty identification practices and a welfarist definition of the poor....

Simple welfare indices such as mean income are ubiquitous but not distribution sensitive. In contrast, existing distribution sensitive welfare indices are rarely used, often because they are difficult to explain and/or lack intuitive units. This paper proposes a simple new distribution sensitive...

Many developing countries' official poverty methodologies rely on nonstandard poverty lines, which complicate poverty comparisons across space or time. The paper considers the case of the Arab Republic of Egypt, whose official poverty lines have two important nonstandard features. First, the...

The poverty line rule defines how the poverty line's nominal monetary amount should be adjusted to prices and preferences. Official poverty lines are based on either of two main rules. “Objective” poverty lines capture the cost of a fixed list of achievements. “Welfaristic” poverty lines...