The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across...

This paper compares the poverty reduction impact of income sources, taxes and transfers across five OECD countries. Since the estimation of that impact can depend on the order in which the various income sources are introduced into the analysis, it is done by using the Shapley value. Estimates...

The paper contributes to the measurement of poverty and vulnerability in three ways. First, we propose a new approach to separating poverty into chronic and transient components. Second, we provide corrections for the statistical biases introduced when using a small number of periods to estimate...

This paper proposes a methodology for testing for whether tax reforms are pro-poor. This is done by extending stochastic dominance techniques to help identify tax reforms that will necessarily be deemed absolutely or relatively pro-poor by a wide spectrum of poverty analysts. The statistical...

The evaluation of development processes and of public policies often involves comparisons of social states in which populations differ in size and longevity. This requires social evaluation principles to be sensitive to both the number and the length of lives. This paper explores the use of...

This paper assesses the effectiveness and progressivity of Uganda’s Universal Primary Education program since it was first introduced in 1997, by examining factors driving primary school attendance, grade delay and drop out trends for children between the ages of 6 and 12 over the past two...

We assess whether global social welfare has improved in the last decades despite (or because of) the substantial increase in global population. We use for this purpose a relatively unknown but simple and attractive social evaluation approach called critical-level generalized utilitarianism...

The paper deals with poverty orderings when multidimensional attributes exhibit some degree of comparability. The paper focuses on an important special case of this, that is, comparisons of poverty that make use of incomes at different time periods. The ordering criteria extend the power of...

The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty ranking across...