New perspectives on a more-or-less familiar poverty index, with extensions

Working Paper 2009-116

Abstract

A particular scale-invariant index of poverty is subjected to careful analysis. This leads to a new perspective, not seen before, on the family of subgroup-consistent and scale-invariant poverty indices. Parametric families of new poverty indices are presented which offer the analyst a degree of flexibility in the choice of transfer sensitivity and distribution sensitivity which has not been available before now.

Authors: Kristof Bosmans, Lucio Esposito, Peter Lambert.