An Anatomy of the Sen and Sen-Shorrocks-Thon Indices : Multiplicative Decomposability and its Subgroup Decompositions

This paper proposes a new and unified framework for the Sen and Sen-Shorrocks-Thon indices of poverty intensity, which shows an explicit connection between the two indices and the underlying social evaluation function. This paper also identifies the common multiplicative decomposition of the two indices. This allows simple and similar geometric interpretations, easy numerical computation, and common subgroup decompositions, which are useful to policy analysts but not possible prior to the multiplicative decomposition