Statistical Inference and Decomposable Poverty Measures

John A Bishop, K Victor Chow and Buhong Zheng

Bulletin of Economic Research, 1995, vol. 47, issue 4, 329-40

Abstract: The paper develops simple statistical test procedures for generalized decomposable poverty measures. It is shown that the estimates of the decomposable poverty indices, including the overall and various sub-group poverty indices, have (asymptotic) jointly normal distributions. The full variance-covariance structure is derived and can be estimated consistently without prior specification of the population density underlying the sample data. The (overall/decomposed) poverty indices can thus be used as tools for statistical inference instead of simply as descriptive statistics. We illustrate the test procedure by examining the contributions of whites and non-whites to total U.S. poverty in 1975 and 1985. Copyright 1995 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the Board of Trustees of the Bulletin of Economic Research

Date: 1995
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