There is a glaring paradox in all commonly used measures of poverty. The death of a poor person, because of poverty, reduces poverty according to these measures. This surely violates our basic intuitions of how poverty measures should behave. It cannot be right in concept that differentially higher mortality among the poor serves to reduce poverty. This paper begins the task of developing poverty measures that are not perversely mortality sensitive. A family of measures is proposed that is an intuitive modification of standard poverty measures to take into account the fact that the rich live longer than the poor. Version: October 2006
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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.:
BLACKORBY, Charles & BOSSERT, Walter & DONALDSON, David, 2006.
"Population Ethics,"
Cahiers de recherche
2006-15, Universite de Montreal, Departement de sciences economiques.
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