Kaushik Basu and James Foster (1998) have opened up an interesting approach to the measurement of literacy, in which the phenomenon of externality has an important role to play. The externality these authors examine is what one may call a 'material' externality, and they demonstrate that...

This paper advances a particular measure of deprivation - called the Capability Failure Ratio (CFR) - on the dimensions of longevity, knowledge and income, and suggests how an (inequality-) 'adjusted' version of the CFR may be derived. These measurement concerns are explored in the context of...