The unidimensional Pigou-Dalton transfer principle demands that a regressive transfer in income--a transfer from worse-off (poor) to better-off (rich)--decreases social welfare. In a multidimensional setting the direct link between income (or any other attribute) and individual well-being is...

We propose a criterion to rank poverty measures on the basis of distribution-sensitivity. The criterion compares reactions to ‘lossy’ transfers among the poor. We focus on the class of rank-dependent poverty measures and provide distribution-sensitivity rankings of the poverty gap ratio, the...