Sequential Stochastic Dominance and the Robustness of Poverty Orderings

When comparing poverty across distributions, an analyst must select a poverty line to identify the poor, an equivalence scale to compare individuals from households of different compositions and sizes, and a poverty index to aggregate individual deprivation into an index of total poverty. A different choice of poverty line, poverty index or equivalent scale can of course reverse an initial poverty ordering. This paper develops sequential stochastic dominance conditions that throw light on the robustness of poverty comparisons to these important measurement issues.