On Sen's Approach to Poverty Measures and Recent Developments

In this paper we discuss the axiomatic approach to poverty measures and propose a unified framework for the Sen indices of poverty intensity which shows an explicit connection between the indices and their common underlying social evaluation function. We also identify the common multiplicative decomposition of the indices that allows simple and similar geometric interpretations and easy numerical computation. These results are easy to understand and useful to policy makers in both developed and developing countries.