IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ega/docume/200707.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Negative Net Incomes and the Measurement of Poverty: A Note

Author

Listed:
  • Sandoval, Héctor H.

    (Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social)

  • Urzúa, Carlos M.

    (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México)

Abstract

This note warns about the careless computation of poverty indexes when the welfare of each household is measured by its net income, since this can be negative. As is illustrated in the case of Mexico, even if only a handful of households report negative incomes, the resulting poverty aggregates, when they go beyond a mere headcount measure, can behave rather badly. The note ends with suggestions on how to deal with the problem.

Suggested Citation

  • Sandoval, Héctor H. & Urzúa, Carlos M., 2007. "Negative Net Incomes and the Measurement of Poverty: A Note," EGAP Working Papers 2007-07, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México.
    • Handle: RePEc:ega:docume:200707
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://alejandria.ccm.itesm.mx/egap/documentos/EGAP-2007-07.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Foster, James & Greer, Joel & Thorbecke, Erik, 1984. "A Class of Decomposable Poverty Measures," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 52(3), pages 761-766, May.
    2. Kakwani, Nanak, 1993. "Statistical Inference in the Measurement of Poverty," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 75(4), pages 632-639, November.
    3. Sen, Amartya K, 1976. "Poverty: An Ordinal Approach to Measurement," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 44(2), pages 219-231, March.
    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


    Cited by:

    1. Ceriani, Lidia & Hlasny, Vladimir & Verme, Paolo, 2021. "Bottom Incomes and the Measurement of Poverty: A Brief Assessment of the Literature," GLO Discussion Paper Series 914, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    2. Olga Alonso-Villar & Coral del Río, 2023. "Poverty among Same-Sex Couple Families in the United States: Is There a Premium for Married Couples?," Working Papers 2301, Universidade de Vigo, Departamento de Economía Aplicada.
    3. Emanuela Raffinetti & Elena Siletti & Achille Vernizzi, 2015. "On the Gini coefficient normalization when attributes with negative values are considered," Statistical Methods & Applications, Springer;Società Italiana di Statistica, vol. 24(3), pages 507-521, September.
    4. Emanuela Raffinetti & Elena Siletti & Achille Vernizzi, 2017. "Analyzing the Effects of Negative and Non-negative Values on Income Inequality: Evidence from the Survey of Household Income and Wealth of the Bank of Italy (2012)," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 133(1), pages 185-207, August.
    5. Srinivasan, Jeena T. & Nuthalapati, Chandra Sekhara Rao, 2019. "Groundwater Extraction, Agriculture and Poverty in Godavari River Basin," Ecology, Economy and Society - the INSEE Journal, Indian Society of Ecological Economics (INSEE), vol. 2(02), July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. LABAR, Kelly & BRESSON, Florent, 2011. "A multidimensional analysis of poverty in China from 1991 to 2006," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 22(4), pages 646-668.
    2. James E. Foster & Joel Greer & Erik Thorbecke, 2010. "The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) Poverty Measures: Twenty-Five Years Later," Working Papers 2010-14, The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy.
    3. Buhong Zheng, 2004. "Poverty comparisons with dependent samples," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 19(3), pages 419-428.
    4. Indranil Dutta & Craig Gundersen & Prasanta K. Pattanaik, 2006. "Measures of Food Insecurity at the Household Level," WIDER Working Paper Series RP2006-95, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    5. Cosme Vodounou, 2004. "Pauvreté, croissance et ciblage : propriétés asymptotiques des estimateurs des élasticités avec application au Bénin," Revue d’économie du développement, De Boeck Université, vol. 12(2), pages 65-84.
    6. Jolliffe, Dean, 2006. "The Cost of Living and the Geographic Distribution of Poverty," Economic Research Report 7254, United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.
    7. Mekonnen Bersisa & Almas Heshmati, 2021. "A Distributional Analysis of Uni-and Multidimensional Poverty and Inequalities in Ethiopia," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 155(3), pages 805-835, June.
    8. Georges Heinrich, 1998. "Changing Times, Testing Times: A Bootstrap Analysis of Poverty and Inequality using the PACO Database," CERT Discussion Papers 9802, Centre for Economic Reform and Transformation, Heriot Watt University.
    9. Simler, Kenneth R. & Arndt, Channing, 2006. "Poverty Comparisons with Endogenous Absolute Poverty Lines," 2006 Annual Meeting, August 12-18, 2006, Queensland, Australia 25775, International Association of Agricultural Economists.
    10. Arab Yarmohamadi, Javad & Abounoori, Esmaiel & Salem, Ali Asghar, 2016. "The Effect of Regional Price Adjustment of Household Expenditures on Poverty Indices in Iran’s Urban Areas," Journal of Money and Economy, Monetary and Banking Research Institute, Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran, vol. 11(2), pages 119-134, April.
    11. Dean Jolliffe, 2003. "On the Relative Well‐Being of the Nonmetropolitan Poor: An Examination of Alternate Definitions of Poverty during the 1990s," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 70(2), pages 295-311, October.
    12. Kenneth R. Simler & Channing Arndt, 2007. "Poverty Comparisons With Absolute Poverty Lines Estimated From Survey Data," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 53(2), pages 275-294, June.
    13. Tahsin Mehdi, 2020. "Testing for Stochastic Dominance up to a Common Relative Poverty Line," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 8(1), pages 1-9, February.
    14. Robert H. DeFina, 2007. "A comparison of poverty trends and policy impacts for working families using different poverty indexes," Working Papers 07-13, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    15. Jolliffe, Dean, 2006. "The Income Gradient and Distribution-Sensitive Measures of Overweight in the U.S," 2006 Annual Meeting, August 12-18, 2006, Queensland, Australia 25677, International Association of Agricultural Economists.
    16. Tomson Ogwang, 2022. "The Foster–Greer–Thorbecke Poverty Measures Reveal More," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 164(3), pages 1481-1503, December.
    17. James Foster & Joel Greer & Erik Thorbecke, 2010. "The Foster–Greer–Thorbecke (FGT) poverty measures: 25 years later," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 8(4), pages 491-524, December.
    18. Davidson, Russell & Flachaire, Emmanuel, 2007. "Asymptotic and bootstrap inference for inequality and poverty measures," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 141(1), pages 141-166, November.
    19. Chakravarty, Satya R. & Deutsch, Joseph & Silber, Jacques, 2008. "On the Watts Multidimensional Poverty Index and its Decomposition," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 36(6), pages 1067-1077, June.
    20. Oihana Aristondo & Casilda Lasso De La Vega & Ana Urrutia, 2010. "A New Multiplicative Decomposition For The Foster–Greer–Thorbecke Poverty Indices," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 62(3), pages 259-267, July.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Poverty measures; poverty indexes; negative income; income and expenditure survey; Mexico;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
    • C81 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Data Collection and Data Estimation Methodology; Computer Programs - - - Methodology for Collecting, Estimating, and Organizing Microeconomic Data; Data Access

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ega:docume:200707. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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 CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Amaranta Arroyo (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/emitemx.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.