A major impediment to poverty evaluation in multivariate environments are the difficulties associated with formulating poverty frontiers. This paper proposes a new multivariate polarization measure which, in appropriate circumstances, works as a multivariate poverty measure which does not require computation of a poverty frontier. As a poverty measure it has the intuitive appeal of reflecting the degree to which societies poor and non-poor are polarized. (The measure would also have considerable application in studying multivariate convergence issues in economic growth models). The measure is exemplified in a poor-non poor country study over the period 1990-2005 based upon the joint distribution of per capita GNP and Life Expectancy. The results suggest that as a group the world’s poor are experiencing diminished poverty polarization, however within the world’s poor the African Nations are experiencing increased poverty polarization.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. 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.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University of Toronto, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
tecipa-366.