Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Population Growth and Poverty Measurement

Contents:

Author Info

  • Chakravarty, Satya R.
  • Kanbur, Ravi
  • Mukherjee, Diganta

Abstract

If the absolute number of poor people goes up, but the fraction of people in poverty comes down, has poverty gone up or gone down? The economist’s instinct, framed by population replication axioms that undergird standard measures of poverty, is to say that in this case poverty has gone down. But this goes against the instinct of those who work directly with the poor, for whom the absolute numbers notion makes more sense as they cope with more poor on the streets or in the soup kitchens. This paper attempts to put these two conceptions of poverty into a common framework. Specifically, it presents an axiomatic development of a family of poverty measures without a population replication axiom. This family has an intuitive link to standard measures, but it also allows one or other of “the absolute numbers” or the “fraction in poverty” conception to be given greater weight by the choice of relevant parameters. We hope that this family will prove useful in empirical and policy work where it is important to give both views of poverty—the economist’s and the practitioner’s—their due.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://purl.umn.edu/127303
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Cornell University, Department of Applied Economics and Management in its series Working Papers with number 127303.

as in new window
Length:
Date of creation: Jul 2002
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:ags:cudawp:127303

Contact details of provider:
Postal: Warren Hall, Ithaca NY 14853
Fax: 607-255-9984
Web page: http://aem.cornell.edu/
More information through EDIRC

Related research

Keywords: Food Security and Poverty;

Other versions of this item:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Broome, John, 1996. "The Welfare Economics of Population," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 48(2), pages 177-93, April.
  2. Shorrocks, Anthony F, 1995. "Revisiting the Sen Poverty Index," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 63(5), pages 1225-30, September.
  3. Blakorby, Charles & Donaldson, David, 1980. "Ethical Indices for the Measurement of Poverty," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 48(4), pages 1053-60, May.
  4. Foster, James & Greer, Joel & Thorbecke, Erik, 1984. "A Class of Decomposable Poverty Measures," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 52(3), pages 761-66, May.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Anthony B. Atkinson & Andrea Brandolini, 2008. "On analysing the world distribution of income," Working Papers 97, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
  2. Claudio Zoli, 2009. "Variable population welfare and poverty orderings satisfying replication properties," Working Papers 69/2009, University of Verona, Department of Economics.
  3. Lucio Esposito & Francesca Majorano, 2011. "What principles should inform poverty indices? Insights from a cross-country survey," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 41(2), pages 387-420, October.
  4. Diganta Mukherjee, 2008. "Poverty measures incorporating variable rate of alleviation due to population growth," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer, vol. 31(1), pages 97-107, June.
  5. Subramanian, S., 2004. "Indicators of Inequality and Poverty," Working Papers UNU-WIDER Research Paper , World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
  6. repec:ebl:ecbull:v:9:y:2003:i:2:p:1-10 is not listed on IDEAS
  7. Julia Paxton, 2003. "A poverty outreach index and its application to microfinance," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 9(2), pages 1-10.
  8. Haider A. Khan, 2004. "On Mortality and Poverty: An Axiomatic Approach With A Modified Index," CIRJE F-Series CIRJE-F-281, CIRJE, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:cudawp:127303

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (AgEcon Search).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.