The poverty impact of indirect tax reforms is analyzed using sequential stochastic dominance methods. This allows agents to differ in dimensions that cannot always be precisely captured within the usual money-metric indicators of living standards. Examples of such dimensions include household...

We have examined recent trends in the poverty in Finland using two data sources, the Household Budget Survey (HBS) and the Income Distribution statistics (IDS). We have drawn on the recent literature on poverty analysis to analyse a range of poverty measures. Scalar measures were complemented by...

In this paper we report our findings as to the extent of poverty among the casual labourers of Shillong, the capital city of Meghalaya, India. Two views of poverty have been considered; first at the per capita (per month) income level and the second at the nutritional level. Nutritional level has...

Inequality measures are often presented in the form of a rank ordering to highlight their relative magnitudes. However, a rank ordering may produce misleading inference, because the inequality measures themselves are statistical estimators with different standard errors, and because a rank...

Variations in aggregate poverty indices can be due to differences in average poverty intensity, to changes in the welfare distances between those poor of initially unequal welfare status, and/or to emerging disparities in welfare among those poor of initially similar welfare status. This note...

This paper introduces a new methodology to target direct transfers against poverty. Our method is based on observable correlates and on estimation methods that focus on the poor. Using data from Tunisia, we estimate ‘focused’ transfer schemes that improve anti-poverty targeting performances....

This paper extends the previous literature on the normative links between the measurement of poverty, social welfare and inequality. We show how, when the range of possible poverty lines is unbounded above, a robust ranking of absolute poverty may be interpreted as a robust ranking of social...

This paper proposes some changes to the official methodology that is currently in use to measure the state of poverty in Mexico. Among other suggestions, it is recommended the use of bootstrapping to estimate confidence intervals for the poverty statistics, as well as the use of dominance...

The relatively widespread use of poverty measures is analysed and their properties compared with other definitions of welfare. Using a synthetic data set but one which shares some properties of the Irish income distribution of 1987, a number of changes in incomes are simulated and their impact...

When evaluating poverty, the relative poverty line may be considered as a percentage of the median income or it may be a percentage of the average income. It is proved that, with a poverty line relative to the median income, reducing poverty may become less costly in proportion to the total...