Negative Net Incomes and the Measurement of Poverty: A Note

Héctor H. Sandoval and Carlos Urzúa
Additional contact information
Héctor H. Sandoval: Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social

No 2007-07, EGAP Working Papers from Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México

Abstract: This note warns about the careless computation of poverty indexes when the welfare of each household is measured by its net income, since this can be negative. As is illustrated in the case of Mexico, even if only a handful of households report negative incomes, the resulting poverty aggregates, when they go beyond a mere headcount measure, can behave rather badly. The note ends with suggestions on how to deal with the problem.

Keywords: Poverty measures; poverty indexes; negative income; income and expenditure survey; Mexico (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://alejandria.ccm.itesm.mx/egap/documentos/EGAP-2007-07.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to alejandria.ccm.itesm.mx:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Journal Article: Negative Net Incomes and the Measurement of Poverty: A Note (2009)
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:ega:docume:200707

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EGAP Working Papers from Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Amaranta Arroyo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).