This paper is concerned with the issue of characterizing the situations in which all the literacy indices, consistent with a set of reasonable axioms, would provide the same ranking of societies. It is shown that a theory, analogous to that developed for the Lorenz order in the study of income inequality, can be obtained in the study of literacy, by extending the standard mathematical theory relating gauge functions to convex functions, and the theory of majorization.
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Paper provided by Cornell University, Center for Analytic Economics in its series Working Papers with number
02-16.
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Find related papers by JEL classification: C60 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Mathematical Methods and Programming - - - General D60 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - General I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare and Poverty - - - General Welfare
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.:
Basu, Kaushik & Foster, James E, 1998.
"On Measuring Literacy,"
Economic Journal,
Royal Economic Society, vol. 108(451), pages 1733-49, November.
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