Intertemporal poverty comparisons

The paper deals with poverty orderings when the value of multidimensional attributes can be compared on a same scale, such as with income of different types or from different members of the same household. The dominance criteria extend the power of earlier multidimensional dominance tests (see Duclos et al. 2006) by making (reasonable) assumptions on the relative marginal contributions of each dimensional attribute to poverty. The paper focuses on an important special case of this, that is comparisons of poverty over time. In contrast to earlier work on intertemporal poverty comparisons, this paper proposes procedures to check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robust to wide classes of aggregation procedures and to broad areas of intertemporal poverty frontiers.