International Comparisons of Poverty Intensity : Index Decomposition and Bootstrap Inference.

This paper proposes an alternative formulation for the Sen-Shorrocks index of poverty intensity for survey data with sampling weights, and decomposes the Sen-Shorrocks index into the poverty rate, the average poverty gap ration among the poor, and the overall Gini index of poverty gap ratios. This decomposition allows the percentage change in poverty intensity to be approximated as the sum of the percentage changes in the poverty rate and average poverty gap ratio.