The present paper is a selective overview, very considerably based on work in which the author himself has been involved, of the difficulties which can arise in the measurement of poverty and inequality when one compares populations of differing size. The paper begins with certain problems...

One rather simple and straightforward way of interpreting a poverty measure is in terms of the ratio of the vector distance between, one the one hand, an actual distribution of incomes and an ideal distribution without any poverty, to the vector distance between a distribution representing...