The paper contributes to the measurement of poverty and vulnerability in three ways. First, we propose a new approach to separating poverty into chronic and transient components. Second, we provide corrections for the statistical biases introduced when using a small number of periods to estimate...

This paper proposes a methodology for testing for whether tax reforms are pro-poor. This is done by extending stochastic dominance techniques to help identify tax reforms that will necessarily be deemed absolutely or relatively pro-poor by a wide spectrum of poverty analysts. The statistical...

We show in this paper that the growth rate of the Sen index is multi-decomposable, that is, decomposable simultaneously by groups and income sources. The multi-decomposition of the poverty growth yields respectively: the growth rate of the poverty incidence (poverty rate) decomposed by groups,...

The evaluation of development processes and of public policies often involves comparisons of social states that differ in income distributions, population sizes and life longevity. This may require social evaluation principles to be sensitive to the quality, the quantity and the duration of...

Assessing the progressivity of a fiscal system is relevant to develop a global idea on the extent of redistribution. In this paper we assess the evolution of progressivity over time and how economic shocks and government fiscal policy affects its design. The social performance of fiscal...

We assess whether global social welfare has improved in the last decades despite (or because of) the substantial increase in global population. We use for this purpose a relatively unknown but simple and attractive social evaluation approach called critical-level generalized utilitarianism...

This paper focusses on the theoretical and computational framework in order to estimate the impact of economic growth or that of the change in inequality on poverty. During the last few years, there was a growing interest to perform such estimations and to anticipate the implication of some...

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...

It is common to argue that poverty is a multidimensional issue. Yet few studies have included the various dimensions of deprivation to yield a broader and fuller picture of poverty. The present paper considers the multidimensional aspects of deprivation by specifying a poverty line for each...

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...