An aspect of variable population poverty comparisons
Abstract
This paper demonstrates that the property of Replication Invariance, generally considered to be an innocuous requirement for the extension of fixed-population poverty comparisons to variable-population contexts, is incompatible with other plausible variable- and fixed-population axioms. This fact raises questions about what constitutes an appropriate headcount assessment of poverty, in terms of whether one should focus on the proportion, or the absolute numbers, of the population in poverty. This observation, in turn, has important implications for tracking poverty and setting targets for its reduction or elimination.Download Info
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Bibliographic Info
Article provided by Elsevier in its journal Journal of Development Economics.
Volume (Year): 98 (2012)
Issue (Month): 2 ()
Pages: 238-241
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Web page: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/devec
Related research
Keywords: Variable populations; Fixed populations; Replication Invariance; Population Focus; Income focus; Impossibility result;Find related papers by JEL classification:
- I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
- D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
- D30 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - General
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Subramanian, Subbu, 2011. "The focus axiom and poverty: On the co-existence of precise language and ambiguous meaning in economic measurement," Economics Discussion Papers 2011-41, Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
- Subramanian, Subbu, 2012. "The focus axiom and poverty: On the co-existence of precise language and ambiguous meaning in economic measurement," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, Kiel Institute for the World Economy, vol. 6(8), pages 1-21.
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