Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the March Current Population Survey, we provide poverty estimates for 1967 to 2012 based on a historical Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). During this period, poverty, as officially measured, has stagnated. However, the official poverty measure (OPM) does not account for the effect of near-cash transfers on the financial resources available ...

The goal of the World Bank is ‘a world free of poverty’ but the most widely used poverty measures do not show when poverty might be eliminated. The ‘head-count index’ simply counts the poor, while the ‘poverty gap index’ shows their average shortfall from the poverty line. Neither measure reflects changes in the distribution of incomes amongst the poor, but squaring the poverty gap brings sensi...

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper analyses the multidimensional child poverty status and its dynamic changes in China from 1989 to 2009 using the China Health and Nutrition survey data. Built on the Alkire–Foster methodology, the adjusted child poverty headcount ratio is calculated which measures not only the traditional headcount ratio of child poverty but also the average deprivation intensity...

Is the issue of children living in poverty recognized by and incorporated into antipoverty strategies? Who are the children living in poverty? Have governments, civil society organizations, and international organizations identified them and adopted policies to reduce child poverty? Is the situation of girls living in poverty taken into account? Are poverty reduction policies following a human ...

Poverty evaluations differ from welfare evaluations in one significant aspect, the existence of a threshold or reference point, the poverty line. It is therefore possible to build up normative evaluation models in which comparisons are made taking distances from this reference point rather than from the origin to be ethically relevant. This is the case in our model of poverty comparisons over h...

Although a large academic literature has discussed why the poverty rate is a poor summary index of trends in poverty, it is still used in much applied policy analysis. This paper begins by summarizing briefly why poverty intensity is a better measure of poverty. Using Luxembourg Income Study data on trends in poverty since the 1970s in Sweden, Canada, the USA and UK, it demonstrates that in abo...

In this paper, we consider an extension of the commonly used poverty gap measure that may be used to address he question of whether the elimination of poverty is a feasible objective, given sufficient political commitment. The resources potentially available to address poverty may be measured by the total amount by which the incomes of the non-poor exceed the same poverty line. The ratio of the...

In this paper, our overall goal is to understand how effective access to infrastructure is in reducing poverty in PNG. To meet this goal, we examine poverty in PNG, and seek to show the relationship between poverty and access to infrastructure and then identify the determinants of poverty. In our analysis, we test whether or not access to infrastructure is a significant factor in a household's ...

This paper reviews the literature of partial poverty orderings. Partial poverty orderings require unanimous poverty rankings for a class of poverty measures or a set of poverty lines. The need to consider multiple poverty measures and multiple poverty lines arises inevitably from the arbitrariness inherent in poverty comparisons. In the paper, we first survey the ordering conditions of various ...