New Stata code to measure poverty accounting for time

The purpose of this presentation is to introduce a new user-written code that allows for measuring poverty in a panel of individuals. It complements existing poverty codes for a cross-section of individuals (e.g. povdeco, poverty) by producing a new family of indices proposed by Gradín, Cantó and Del Río (Review of Income and Wealth, 2012). This family of indices is a natural extension of the popular Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) poverty indices to the longitudinal case in which individuals are observed for more than one period. It takes into account that longer poverty spell durations and more unequal poverty profiles aggravate poverty. These measures have attractive decomposability properties. One particular advantage of this family of indices is that it embraces other indices recently proposed in the literature as particular cases.