This paper explores a unified framework for the study of changes in poverty over time as measured by the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty indices. First we identify a multiplicative decomposition for the indices of this family as a product of the three components which should be involved in every poverty index: the incidence, the intensity and the inequality in the distribution of the income of t...

In this note we approach the question of relative poverty from a different angle. Fixing the poverty line, we ask: What is the extent of poverty relative to the resources available in the society to eradicate it? We argue that the same level of poverty is “worse” if the resources available to address it are greater. We characterize a class of indices that measure Poverty Reduction Failure and p...

We examine the European Union (EU) countries and within-country areas (i.e., large urban areas, small urban areas, and rural areas) that are the most disadvantageous with respect to multidimensional poverty and in each of the investigated dimensions, i.e., health, education, and living standards. To this end, we construct the Multidimensional Poverty Index and its sub-indices: the Poverty in He...

This paper presents an axiomatic framework for measuring lifetime poverty over multiple periods. For an individual, we argue that lifetime poverty is influenced by both the “snapshot” poverty of each period and the poverty level of the “permanent” lifetime consumption; it is also influenced by how poverty spells are distributed over the lifetime. For a society, we consider a path-independence r...

This note advances a family of poverty measures, Πα, which are derived as simple, normalized Minkowski distance functions. The Πα indices turn out to be the αth roots of the corresponding Foster, Greer and Thorbecke Pα indices. The re-calibration of Pα in terms of Πα could have certain possible advantages, which are reviewed in the note. While the Πα indices are not decomposable in the ordinari...

Relative poverty lines such as one-half median income have been increasingly used in poverty studies. This paper contributes to the literature by developing statistical inference for testing decomposable poverty measures with relative poverty lines. The poverty lines we consider are percentages of mean income and percentages of quantiles. We show that the estimates of poverty indices with relat...

In this paper we introduce a new family of poverty measures for comparing and ordering social situations. The aggregation scheme of these poverty measures is based on the oneparameter family of exponential means. The poverty measures introduced satisfy interesting properties and the dual decomposition of the underlying exponential means induces a natural decomposition of the proposed poverty in...

This paper proposes to use an information theory approach to the design of multidimensional poverty indices. Traditional monetary approaches to poverty rely on the strong assumption that all relevant attributes of well-being are perfectly substitutable. Based on the idea of the essentiality of some attributes, scholars have recently suggested multidimensional poverty indices where the existence...

The Chinese government aims to deal with poverty by 2020 for people living in ethnic and rural regions, including mountainous ethnic regions with the highest concentration of poverty and chronic poverty. Based on a sustainable livelihood Framework, five capitals and 33 evaluation indices of livelihood were built, and 13 counties’ resources of the Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture were...

Multidimensional poverty concentrates on deprivations in the living standard of a population in terms of functioning failures of different quality of life attributes such as per capita real GDP, life expectancy at birth and educational attainment. More precisely, a threshold level is specified for each attribute and shortfalls of quantities of different attributes from respective thresholds for...