Why not consider that being absolutely poor is worse than being only relatively poor?

Benoît Decerf ()

Journal of Public Economics, 2017, vol. 152, issue C, 79-92

Abstract: No current strategy to measure income poverty is able to (i) account for both its absolute and relative aspects and (ii) always consider that an individual who is absolutely poor is poorer than another individual who is only relatively poor. I propose a measure of income poverty satisfying (i) and (ii). Unlike alternative proposals satisfying (i), a decrease in a poor individual's income never reduces this measure. An application illustrates that the measure yields intuitive judgments about unequal growth experiences, for which all absolute (resp. relative) poverty measures systematically conclude that poverty has decreased (resp. increased).

Keywords: Income poverty measure; Relative poverty; Absolute poverty; Unequal growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272717300956
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:152:y:2017:i:c:p:79-92

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2017.06.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba

More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().