Given any income distribution, to each income we associate a subgroup containing all persons whose incomes are not higher than this income and a person?s target shortfall in a subgroup is the gap between the subgroup highest income and his own income. We then develop an absolute target shortfall...

This paper develops an axiomatic approach to the measurement of social exclusion. At the individual level, social exclusion is viewed in terms of deprivation of the person concerned with respect to different functionings in the society. At the aggregate level we treat social exclusion as a...

This paper examines theoretical properties of local and global measures of income tax progressivity. In particular, consistency property of global measures with local measures is analyzed. Using a normative approach, an index of performance in effective progression underlying a tax system, in...

This article introduces a general model for voting games with multiple weight vectors. Each weight vector characterises a parameter representing a distinct aspect of the voting mechanism. Our main innovation is to model the winning condition by an arbitrary dichotomous function which determines...

A recent trend in the study of poverty is to consider a relative poverty line, one that is responsive to the nature of the income distribution. We develop an axiomatic approach to the determination of an amalgam poverty line. Given a reference income (e.g. the mean or the median), the amalgam...

This paper estimates the number of poor in various countries in Asia by applying an "amalgam poverty line", which is a weighted average of an absolute poverty line (such as $1.25 per day or $1.45 per day) and a reference income (such as the mean or the median income). The number of poor is...

Given a poverty line, a person who is non-poor (poor) currently may not be treated as non-poor (poor) in a vulnerable situation. This paper looks at the impact of vulnerability on the poverty line. The poverty line is adjusted in the presence of vulnerability such that the utility of a person at...

We examine the measurement of individual poverty in an intertemporal context. Our aim is to capture the importance of persistence in a state of poverty and we characterize a corresponding individual intertemporal poverty measure. Our first axiom requires that intertemporal poverty is identical...

Basu and Foster (1998) characterized a sophisticated literacy measure using five axioms. In this paper we argue that if a measure satisfies three of their five axioms, namely, anonymity, monotonicity and externality, then also it becomes suitable in some applications. We, therefore, introduce...

We examine the measurement of individual poverty in an intertemporal context. In contrast to earlier contributions, we assign importance to the persistence in a state of poverty and we characterize a class of individual intertemporal poverty measures reflecting this feature. In addition, we...