We address the problem of ranking distributions of opportunity sets in terms of poverty. In order to accomplish this task, we identify a suitable notion of ‘multidimensional poverty line’ and we characterize axiomatically several poverty rankings of opportunity profiles. Among them, the Head-Count and the OpportunityGap poverty rankings, which are the natural counterparts of the most widely use...

I derive poverty indices taking into account both the absolute and relative aspects of income well-being. The trade-off made by the social planner between those two aspects is captured at individual level by a well-being ordering. This ordering evaluates the well-being of an agent based on her income and a reference statistic on the income distribution, typically the mean. A family of poverty i...

This paper presents a new family of chronic poverty measures based on the P α poverty measures of Foster, Greer,and Thorbecke (1984). The chronically poor are identified using two cutoffs: a standard poverty line, which identifies the time periods during which a person is poor; and a duration cutoff, which is the minimum percentage of time a person must be in poverty in order to be chronically ...

The ‘feminisation of poverty’ is often referred to without adequate specification or substantiation, and does not necessarily highlight aspects of poverty which are most relevant to women at the grassroots. The UNDP’s gender indices go some way to reflecting gendered poverty, but there is scope for improvement. In order to work towards aggregate indices which are more sensitive to gender gaps i...

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...

We propose a new class of multidimensional poverty indices. Aggregation of the different dimensions relies on individual preferences. The Pareto principle is, therefore, satisfied among the poor. The indices add up individual measures of poverty that are computed as a convex transform of the fraction of the poverty line vector to which the agent is indifferent. The axiomatic characterization of...