Premature mortality and poverty measurement
نویسندگان
چکیده
There is a glaring paradox in all commonly used measures of poverty. The death of a poor person reduces poverty according to these measures. This surely violates our basic intuitions of how poverty measures should behave. It cannot be right in concept that differentially higher mortality among the poor serves to reduce poverty. This paper begins the task of developing poverty measures that are not perversely mortality sensitive. A family of measures is proposed that is an intuitive modification of standard poverty measures to take into account the fact that the rich live longer than the poor. NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY In the presence of premature mortality for the poorer sections of the population, standard snapshot poverty measures will show a decrease. To avoid this welfare measurement paradox, in this paper we develop and characterise a poverty measure based on the life time income profile of an individual. This measure does not exhibit such paradoxical behaviour but one can further modify this measure, defining it on a normative rather than actual life time of the individuals so that premature mortality of the poor actually effects the poverty measure positively. We characterise and illustrate such a measure here and indicate how to compute this measure in practise in a simple fashion. Choice of the normative length of life, L, is a crucial issue for this life time poverty measurement. The poverty ranking of a population may change with respect to other population groups if the value of L is changed, say from 80 to 70 years. Thus, a careful choice of L is an important element of this analysis. We could have put forth a two-dimensional snapshot measure of well-being as a solution to this problem, with poverty and life expectancy of the population as the two determinants. But that would still have missed looking at the poor who are actually, but albeit prematurely, dead.
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تاریخ انتشار 2003