Welfare-Consistent Global Poverty Measures
The paper provides new measures of global poverty that take seriously the idea of relative-income comparisons but also acknowledge a deep identification problem when the latent norms defining poverty vary systematically across countries....
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/375681503578018837/Welfare-consistent-global-poverty-measures http://hdl.handle.net/10986/27977 |
| Summary: | The paper provides new measures of
global poverty that take seriously the idea of
relative-income comparisons but also acknowledge a deep
identification problem when the latent norms defining
poverty vary systematically across countries.
Welfare-consistent measures are shown to be bounded below by
a fixed absolute line and above by weakly-relative lines
derived from a theoretical model of relative-income
comparisons calibrated to data on national poverty lines.
Both bounds indicate falling global poverty incidence, but
more slowly for the upper bound. Either way, the developing
world has a higher poverty incidence but is making more
progress against poverty than the developed world. |
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