Poverty Measurement with Ordinal Data

Chrysanthi Hatzimasoura () and Christopher Bennett ()

Working Papers from The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy

Abstract: The Foster, Greer, Thorbecke (1984) class nests several of the most widely used mea- sures in theoretical and empirical work on economic poverty. Use of this general class of measures, however, presupposes a dimension of well-being that, like income, is cardinally measurable. Responding to recent interest in dimensions of well-being where achievements are recorded on an ordinal scale, this paper develops counterparts to the popular FGT measures that are still meaningful when applied to ordinal data. The resulting ordinal FGT measures retain the simplicity of the classical FGT measures and also many of their desirable features, including additive decomposability. This paper also develops ordinal analogues of the core axioms from the literature on economic poverty, and demonstrates that the ordinal FGT measures indeed satisfy these core axioms. Moreover, new domi- nance conditions, which allow for poverty rankings that are robust with respect to the choice of poverty line, are established. Lastly, the ordinal FGT measures are illustrated using self-reported data on health status in Canada and the United States.

Keywords: poverty measurement; ordinal data; FGT poverty measures; social welfare; dominance conditions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I3 I32 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2011-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gwi:wpaper:2011-14

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