A novel approach to the assessment of literacy is used to tackle the issue of effectiveness of years of schooling. The dichotomy inherent in the literacy rate is rejected in favor of a “practice-based” approach, which considers literacy as a multifaceted phenomenon as advocated in...

Introduction to the Special Issue on Inequality and the Great Recession

What are the challenges posed by the analysis of self-reported life satisfaction and material wellbeing/hardship? We explore the complex relationship between objective and subjective indicators using primary data from two diverse sources—a questionnaire survey of 3883 undergraduate students in...

We lay out alternative ways of melding measures of absolute and relative deprivation in an index of overall deprivation, exploring the choices the analyst faces in this enterprise. The indices derived are used to answer two important empirical questions. First, did overall deprivation fall in...

Questionnaires exploring the relativist vs absolutist perception of wellbeing are administered to 3883 students in eight different countries, four low-income countries (Bolivia, Brazil, Kenya and Laos, 1924 respondents) and four high-income countries (Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK, 1959...

A particular scale-invariant index of poverty is subjected to careful analysis. This leads to a new perspective, not seen before, on the family of subgroup-consistent and scale-invariant poverty indices. Parametric families of new poverty indices are presented which offer the analyst a degree of...

Current poverty measurement methodology does not allow a definitive analysis of changes in distribution, through time or between countries, which involve changes in the number or proportion of poor people. By revisiting the continuity and transfer axioms, we show that within the Bourguignon and...