On Sen's Approach to Poverty Measures and Recent Developments

Kuan Xu () and Lars Spencer Osberg ()

Department of Economics at Dalhousie University working papers archive from Dalhousie, Department of Economics

Abstract: In this paper we discuss the axiomatic approach to poverty measures and propose a unified framework for the Sen indices of poverty intensity which shows an explicit connection between the indices and their common underlying social evaluation function. We also identify the common multiplicative decomposition of the indices that allows simple and similar geometric interpretations and easy numerical computation. These results are easy to understand and useful to policy makers in both developed and developing countries.

Keywords: poverty intensity; poverty rate; poverty gap; equally-distributed-equivalent-income; social evaluation function; Gini index; economic policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C00 H00 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
Date: 2002-07-18
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations View citations in EconPapers (7) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.economics.dal.ca/RePEc/dal/wparch/sensw.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dal:wparch:sensw

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics at Dalhousie University working papers archive from Dalhousie, Department of Economics
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().