Fair and Welfare-Consistent Global Income Poverty Measurement: Theory and Application

There is growing support for the idea that global income poverty should be assessed with a measure accounting both own and relative income. The trade-off such makes between key question. Non-paternalism requires this welfareconsistent, is, related to individual preferences. This paper studies implications of requiring fair welfare-consistent aggregation results provide absolute lines proposed in literature but rule out use classical indexes. In particular, finds ubiquitoushead-count ratio violates minimal welfare-consistency property. shows empirically using modification head-count satisfies property has major evaluation poverty.