Poverty Without Poverty Line

No 2024-07, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: I propose a new cardinal measure of poverty, which builds on the intuitive notion that a person with half the income of another is twice as poor. Mathematically, this implies that poverty is the reciprocal of income. The resulting aggregate measure has a simple interpretation: it is the average number of days needed to get a reference level of income. I call the measure average poorness, to reflect the fact that poverty is a spectrum and not a binary status. The new measure has excellent properties, being additively decomposable in population subgroups, fully accounting for the depth and severity of poverty, and generating orderings and comparisons that are robust to the choice of reference level of income. Using data from a survey experiment, I show that the new measure is consistent with how a majority of experts and members of the public think about poverty.

Keywords: Poverty; Average Poorness; Poverty line; Focus Axiom (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 I32 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:501e8eb8-3ce7-4ac0-9d09-03b7cecfd16b (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2024-07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Julia Coffey ().