modeling household behavior in developing countries discussion a large and growing body of literature has examined how agricultural households cope with risk much of the work has focused on which types of households are better able to smooth consumption testing whether households with more resources and greater access to income smoothing institutions such as credit markets or well functioning labor markets exhibit greater consumption smoothing however income shocks may have different effects upon different individuals within households and differences in individual ability to smooth income or consumption may have welfare consequences which go beyond foregone income the development of collective household models challenges the assumption that individuals within households maximize a single utility function the assumption of income pooling has also been rejected in a growing body of empirical research on intrahousehold resource allocation however research on risk pooling within households and differences in individual abilities to smooth consumption is relatively new selected papers are discussed

measuring lifetime poverty abstract this paper presents an axiomatic framework for measuring lifetime poverty over multiple periods for an individual we argue that lifetime poverty is influenced by both the snapshot poverty of each period and the poverty level of the permanent lifetime consumption it is also influenced by how poverty spells are distributed over the lifetime we axiomatically characterize classes of lifetime poverty indices and derive dominance conditions of poverty orderings for both individual and societal lifetime poverty measurements

global educational expansion and socio economic development an assessment of findings from the social sciences summary among development agencies conventional wisdom holds that educational expansion improves economic welfare and health reduces inequalities and encourages democratic political systems we investigate the empirical foundations for these expectations in recent social science research consistent evidence indicates that health and demographic benefits result from educational expansion and suggests that education enhances but does not ensure individuals economic security however the impact of educational expansion on growth remains debated and decades of sociological studies offer evidence that educational expansion does not necessarily narrow social inequalities finally considerable controversy surrounds the implications of educational expansion for democratization reasonable forecasts of the consequences of further educational expansions need to consider the diverse social contexts in which these expansions will occur

asset growth anomaly in europe do profits and losses matter abstract this paper investigates whether the well documented asset growth effect on stock returns exists across both profit and loss firms in european capital markets we find that the asset growth anomaly is more pronounced across loss firms and is significantly dampened by the inclusion of profit firms in the sample the raw and abnormal returns earned from a hedge strategy on balance sheet growth for loss firms are almost two times higher than the respective returns for profit firms our evidence casts doubt on a risk based explanation thereby lending credence to the suggestion that the asset growth effect is attributable to mispricing

poverty inequality and welfare this paper argues that in order to produce a coherent account of pov erty that makes it more than just a facet of inequality it is essent ial to capture at the individual level those factors that a k sen p townsend and others have argued to be important in generating po verty it is shown that having done this it is possible to produce me asures of poverty and inequality that are clearly and systematically related to each other and to the overall level of welfare but in whi ch poverty emerges as more than just a facet of a wider and more gene ral concern with inequality copyright 1987 by royal economic society

intrahousehold resource allocation in an uncertain environment the literature on risk management by agricultural households has made important contributions to our understanding of household level economic decisions in developing countries because incomes from particular farming enterprises fluctuate widely depending on weather crop prices and macroeconomic policies households adopt a number of strategies to smooth their consumption one approach is to diversify the sources of income for the household the members of peasant households may engage in farming trading and other business activities and wage labor reardon delgado and matlon when household members are involved in multiple activities and pool their income total household income may be less subject to extreme variation morduch notes mitigating risk through production choices can be costly since typically expected profits must be sacrificed for lower risk p 104 this approach to risk management may be costly for the household over the past three decades economists have used theories of household risk management and consumption smoothing to explain behavior observed in peasant households for example the purchase and sale of assets are frequently used as a means of savings and consumption smoothing when there are limited formal financial institutions marriage decisions may establish kin relationships with people in areas that experience different weather and production shocks rosenzweig and stark although it may seem inefficient for households to farm numerous small plots that are widely scattered this strategy provides some protection against location specific crop failures from bad weather or pests mcclosky walker and ryan the extensive literature on contracting and sharecropping arrangements focuses on the role that these institutions play in minimizing a household s exposure to risk hoff braverman and stiglitz all of these theories assume that households

ethically flexible measures of poverty this paper introduces new measures of both relative and absolute poverty using the notion of representative income of a community corresponding to the censored income distribution these new measures satisfy the monotonicity and transfer axioms proposed by sen 1976 in all cases

poverty and growth impacts of high oil prices evidence from sri lanka the sharp rise in oil and food prices in 2007 and 2008 caused negative impacts on poverty and economic growth in many oil and food importing developing countries some analysts believe that these countries are under stress again due to a rise in crude oil prices to a two and a half year high in march 2011 which has also been partly responsible for higher food prices in recent months however there is a limited body of empirical evidence available from developing countries on the impact of high oil prices on growth in general and household poverty in particular in this study sri lanka is used as a case study and a computable general equilibrium cge approach is adopted as an analytical framework to explore the growth and poverty impacts of high oil prices the results suggest that urban low income households are the group most adversely affected by high global oil prices followed by low income rural households in contrast estate low income households are the least affected out of all low income households the energy intensive manufacturing sector and services sector are affected most compared to the agricultural sector

can a poverty index be both relative and absolute beginning with the work of a k sen 1976 poverty research has made extensive use of axioms to construct and evaluate distribution sensitive poverty measures an index is distribution sensitive if it satisfies sen s 1976 weak transfer axiom poverty decreases when income is transferred from a high income poor person to a low income poor person a distribution sensitive measure is appealing because it reflects the extent of deprivation among the poor and incorporates aspects of poverty that are ignored by standard measures such as the headcount ratio and poverty gap ratio in addition to the weak transfer axiom a number of other axioms that have considerable intuitive appeal when considered in isolation have been identified however several researchers e g thon 1979 kundu and smith 1983 and donaldson and weymark 1986 have shown that in some cases it is impossible to devise a poverty index that is consistent with the joint implications of otherwise reasonable axioms foster 1984 p 233 interprets the difficulties caused by the combined effects of two or more axioms as a warning not to measure too many aspects of poverty at the same time as a consequence it is now generally recognized that poverty axioms can have joint effects and it is important to explore the implications of such influences in a comprehensive investigation of subgroup consistent poverty measures foster and shorrocks 1991 examine the interaction between the scale invariance and translation invariance axioms 2 the first axiom requires a poverty index to be unaffected by the doubling of all incomes and the poverty line the second axiom requires a poverty index to be unaffected by equal increments to each income and to the poverty line 3 poverty indices that satisfy the first axiom are considered to be relative poverty indices while those satisfying the second are absolute poverty indices if a distribution sensitive index satisfying both axioms could be found it would provide a single measure of relative and absolute poverty and have considerable intuitive appeal in poverty measurement but one implication of foster and shorrocks 1991 work proposition 6 is that for the class of poverty measures they consider a distribution sensitive poverty index that is both relative and absolute cannot exist this note follows foster and shorrocks 1991 but concentrates on the implications of the joint effects of scale and translation invariance we drop the assumption of subgroup consistency and derive a proposition that has several important implications first for all poverty indices only those relying upon simple headcounts of the poor satisfy both the scale and translation invariance axioms this result clearly illustrates the strong restrictions imposed by combining scale and translation invariance with other standard axioms there can be no distribution sensitive poverty index that is relative and absolute second the result provides a simple characterization of the entire class of the headcount related poverty indices defined below third the result leads to a direct proof of the result

haddad lawrence john hoddinott and harold alderman eds intrahousehold resource allocation in developing countries models methods and policy baltimore md johns hopkins university press 1997 384 pp 55 00 in this volume economists demographers sociologists and anthropologists collaborate in the study of how resources are allocated within households in developing countries and why it matters from a policy perspective surveying a broad range of theory and evidence the contributors examine the many social and cultural factors that influence decisions about the family and household level about the allocation of time income assets and other resources ths contributors show that a more complete understanding of intrahousehold behaviour can increase the likelihood that policies will reach the people they are intended to affect

international comparisons of poverty intensity index decomposition and bootstrap inference this paper proposes an alternative formulation for the sen shorrocks thon sst index of poverty intensity that is appropriate for survey data with sampling weights it also decomposes the sst index into the poverty rate the average poverty gap ratio among the poor and the overall gini index of poverty gap ratios to account for sampling variation in estimates of poverty intensity this paper uses the bootstrap method to compute confidence intervals and presents international comparisons using luxembourg income study lis data from the 1970s to the 1990s cross sectional and longitudinal analyses indicate that the percentage change in poverty intensity can be approximated by the sum of percentage changes in the poverty rate and average poverty gap ratio since changes in the overall gini index of poverty gap ratios are negligible in the early 1970s poverty intensity in canada and the united states was almost indistinguishable but in the 1970s canadian poverty intensity decreased large increases in poverty intensity occurred in the 1980s in the united states the united kingdom and sweden

density social networks and job search methods theory and application to egypt we first develop a theoretical model in which individuals are embedded within a network of social relationships we show that conditional on being employed the probability to find a job through social networks relative to other search methods increases and is concave with the size of the network the effects are stronger for the uneducated there is however a critical size of the network above which this probability decreases we then test empirically these theoretical findings for egypt using the 1998 labor market survey the empirical evidence supports the predictions of our theoretical model

the asset growth effect insights from international equity markets abstract firms with higher asset growth rates subsequently experience lower stock returns in international equity markets consistent with the u s evidence this negative effect of asset growth on returns is stronger in more developed capital markets and markets where stocks are more efficiently priced but is unrelated to country characteristics representing limits to arbitrage investor protection and accounting quality the evidence suggests that the cross sectional relation between asset growth and stock return is more likely due to an optimal investment effect than due to overinvestment market timing or other forms of mispricing

a class of poverty indices a review of a number of well known poverty indices shows that two axiomatic requirements to a pover ty index are never satisfied simultaneously the choice between these two axioms depends on the nature of the poverty line a class of pov erty indices is developed as an application of the dalton and atkinso n inequality to poverty measurement almost all other poverty indices are seen to be a member of the class the formulation of this class clarifies the basic problems involved in poverty measurement copyright 1987 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

counting and multidimensional poverty measurement this paper proposes a new methodology for multidimensional poverty measurement consisting of an identification method k that extends the traditional intersection and union approaches and a class of poverty measures m our identification step employs two forms of cutoff one within each dimension to determine whether a person is deprived in that dimension and a second across dimensions that identifies the poor by counting the dimensions in which a person is deprived the aggregation step employs the fgt measures appropriately adjusted to account for multidimensionality the axioms are presented as joint restrictions on identification and the measures and the methodology satisfies a range of desirable properties including decomposability the identification method is particularly well suited for use with ordinal data as is the first of our measures the adjusted headcount ratio we present some dominance results and an interpretation of the adjusted headcount ratio as a measure of unfreedom examples from the us and indonesia illustrate our methodology

the information content of losses abstract this study hypothesizes that because shareholders have a liquidation option losses are not expected to perpetuate they are thus less informative than profits about the firm s future prospects the results are consistent with the hypothesis they also show that the documented increase in the earnings response coefficent as the cumulation period increases appears to be due exclusively to the effect of losses the liquidation option effect extends to profitable cases where earnings are low enough to make the option attractive alternating explanations for the low informativeness of losses such as mean reversal of earnings are not supported by the tests

caste discrimination in the indian urban labour market abstract this the pioneering quantitative analysis of caste in the indian urban labour market examines the age old problem of caste in the light of discrimination theory and government policy using a survey of workers in delhi the gross wage difference between scheduled untouchable and non scheduled caste is decomposed into its explained and discrimination components and from a model of occupation choice into wage and job discrimination discrimination is found to exist and to operate at least in part through the traditional mechanism viz assignment to jobs with the scheduled castes entering poorly paid dead end jobs it is assisted by methods of recruitment based on contacts prevalent in the manual occupation which also cause past discrimination to carry over to the present its practice serves the economic interests of those who exercise a taste for discrimination

consumption needs and inequality most empirical studies demonstrating a u turn in inequality in the united states are based on the distribution of income however utility is derived from the consumption of goods and services and there are many reasons to expect the distribution of expenditure to be different from the distribution of income the author demonstrates that consumption based inequality indexes actually decrease over the postwar era this conclusion differs from the stylized facts because of differences in the income and expenditure distributions differences also arise from the inclusion of equivalence scales to account for the different needs of heterogeneous households copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

poverty comparisons with dependent samples standard inference procedures for poverty comparisons require samples to be independent for many commonly used income samples however this requirement is not ful lled since samples are rotated this note introduces an easy to use method of correction for sample dependency we also apply the method to test changes in u s poverty in the 1990s and evaluate the marginal effects of public assistance on poverty before and after the recent welfare reform

the marriage earnings premium as a distributed fixed effect wage equations using cross sectional data typically find an earnings premium in excess of 10 percent for married men one leading hypothesis for the premium is that marriage facilitates specialization that enables married men to become more productive than single men another is that the premium is attributable to an unobserved fixed effect married men possessing qualities that are valued in the labor market as well as the marriage market this paper suggests that the premium is attributable to an unobserved timedistributed fixed effect that emerges and grows with the approach of marriage and continues to grow for some years after marriage a similar distributed fixed effect is found in the case of women but it is smaller and declines after a few years of marriage the results appear to cast doubt on the specialization hypothesis

momentum in global equity markets in times of troubles does the economic state matter this paper investigates the profitability of momentum based trading strategies pursued during the most recent economic downturns in global equity markets in contrast to previous studies it reveals that such strategies generated statistically significant negative returns during the most recent recessions these momentum crashes happen during market reversals following exceptionally large market declines as occurred in march and april 2009

bridging the gap between the measurement of poverty and of deprivation one way of measuring the deprivation or poverty of persons is to use money based measures a person is regarded as poor if his her income or expenditure falls below a poverty line value such an approach usually termed poverty analysis has spawned a large literature embodying several sophisticated measures of poverty the downside to this is that low income or expenditure may not be very good indicators of deprivation another way usually termed deprivation analysis is to define an index whose value for each person is the number or proportion of items from a prescribed list that he she possesses persons are then regarded as deprived if their index value is below some threshold value this offers an alternative method of identifying deprived persons the downside of deprivation analysis is that it measures deprivation exclusively in terms of the proportion of deprived persons in the total number of persons the purpose of this paper is to bridge the gap between poverty and deprivation an

job recruitment networks and migration to cities in india abstract economists have focused on job search and supply side explanations for network effects in labour transactions this paper develops and tests an alternative explanation for the high prevalence of network based labour market entry in developing countries in our theoretical framework employers use employee networks as screening and incentive mechanisms to improve the quality of recruitment our framework suggests a negative relationship between network use and the skill intensity of jobs a positive association between economic activity and network use and a negative relationship between network use and pro labour legislation furthermore social identity effects are expected to intensify when compared to information sharing and other network mechanisms using data from an all india employment survey we implement a novel empirical strategy to test these relationships and find support for our demand side explanation

welfare approaches to the measurement of poverty a set of poverty indices is constructed which is based on an explicit view of the loss of social welfare which results from the existence of poverty in comparison t o a society in which poverty has been eliminated the indices are based on the entire distribution of income rather than only the incomes of the poor and thus embody the concept of relative deprivation formal properties of the indices are developed together with their relationship to welfare based inequality indices both are seen as subsets of a wider choice of measures dependent on a particular choice of reference distribution copyright 1987 by royal economic society

literacy sharing assortative mating or what labour market advantages and proximate illiteracy revisited abstract this paper explores the relationship between household literacy and the labour market outcomes of illiterate household members which basu narayan and ravallion 2002 report using household income and expenditure data from bangladesh bnr attribute a considerable wage premium for proximate illiterate women in off farm employment to labour productivity gains from intra household literacy sharing this wage premium also suggests that women may be more efficient recipients of literacy externalities than men we propose that any such relationship might not be due to higher labour productivity but may have other explanations such as systematically different and unobserved attributes of illiterate females married into literate households we also pay attention to the negative selection of illiterate females into non farm wage employment which contrary to received wisdom suggests that household literacy may not be unambiguously progressive for females we propose that the widely reported finding that

testing among models of intrahousehold resource allocation households are the locus for much economic decision making households function as producers investors in human and physical capital managers of risk and as consumers many resources are allocated within households and the effects of many policies depend on the dynamics of household decision making for example household decisions about allocating food among individual household members may determine who benefits from programs to improve health nutrition or welfare in many microeconomic studies the household is treated as an individual for analytical purposes in other words it is assumed that a household acts as a single entity with a single set of preferences recently however a number of economists have recognized that households are sites of conflict as well as cooperation and have begun to use new classes of models to explain how resources are allocated among household members this literature has especially improved our understanding of households in which income is not completely pooled in such a setting standard household models may offer misleading conclusions about the effects of policies on individual household members i this paper goes beyond recent surveys of intrahousehold issue by explicitly examining the assumptions predictions and empirical implications of different intrahousehold models in particular it analyzes empirical tests that distinguish among competing models by clarifying the similarities and differences among alternative models this paper also clarifies what has actually been demonstrated and what has not been demonstrated by previous empirical studies in so doing the paper points to specific topics in need of further research this paper is organized as follows section 2 analyzes the assumptions and predictions of each of the five main classes of intrahousehold resource allocation models section 3 describes empirical tests of these assumptions along with an analysis of empirical work that has been generated sections 4 and 5 discuss the questions that remain unanswered and directions for future research

the relevance of standard estimates of rates of return to schooling for education policy a critical assessment abstract this paper examines the accuracy and usefulness of estimated rates of return to schooling based on the standard human capital model of becker and mincer regarding accuracy it investigates whether failure to account for differences in ability and school quality lead to significant biases estimates using ghanaian data confirm this possibility even when accurate estimated rates of return to additional years of schooling may have limited policy implications more useful for governments are rates of return to investments in school quality the paper uses data on cognitive skills to estimate rates of return to three types of school quality improvements

health nutrition and economic development the relationship between health and economic development is explored focusing on nutrition based health indicators the spotlight is placed on the inter related feedbacks between the influence of health on productivity on one hand and the influence of income on health status on the other disentangling causality in these relationships has preoccupied much of the literature we evaluate different empirical strategies that have been adopted and assess the results there is now a body of evidence based on careful empirical studies that demonstrates a causal relationship between health and labor productivity there is also evidence that at least among the very poor additional income is spent on improved nutrition there are two issues that have received little attention although we argue they are likely to be very important first measurement of health is discussed in detail evidence is presented on how taking into account differences in the extent of measurement error is critical for interpreting the impact of health on wages the same theme emerges in studies of the effect of income on health specifically calorie intake the key role of non linearities in these relationships is highlighted and we demonstrate that a good deal of the variation in estimates of income elasticities of demand for calories can be ascribed to the role of measurement and functional form authors

poverty measurement an index related to a theil measure of inequality a major problem that arises in measuring poverty is the adequate expression in a poverty index of the information from the incomes of individuals below the poverty line this article evaluates several poverty indexes on the basis of their ability to satisfy five properties desirable for a poverty index the only index that satisfies all five properties is one related to a theil measure of inequality simulations show that this index and an index related to the coefficient of variation provide appropriate ranks for the desirability of various algorithms for transferring income to the poor

poverty in america 1970 1990 who did gain ground an application of stochastic dominance criteria employing simultaneous inequality tests in a partial panel atkinson 1987 proposed stochastic dominance criteria for analysing poverty which under certain conditions establish orderings of states for any poverty line and any poverty measure within given class refocusing debate on the nature of the income distribution of the poor employing new empirical techniques these criteria are implemented for the united states from 1970 to 1990 using the panel study of income dynamics results highlight the pivotal role of family size scale economies in consumption indicate different experiences for white versus non white groups and suggest that optimism over the progress of the poor is not warranted copyright 2003 john wiley sons ltd

does the labour market explain lower female schooling in india labour market discrimination against women and parental discrimination against daughters are two of the most commonly cited explanations of the gender gap in education in developing countries this study empirically tests the labour market explanation for india using recent household survey data the results reveal substantial omitted family background bias in the estimates of rates of return to education the findings suggest that as well as overall labour market discrimination girls face poorer economic incentives to invest in schooling than boys because they reap lower labour market returns to education than boys

what has luck got to do with it a regional analysis of poverty and agricultural growth in rural india this article explores the role of agro ecological factors associated with agricultural growth and poverty outcomes in india using a new operationalisation of agro ecological factors and incorporating within state variations in poverty and other variables we show that agricultural growth and poverty reduction appear to depend on underlying agro ecological conditions which are favourable to the spread of irrigation and hence agricultural development which in turn in associated with poverty reduction promotion of agriculture in less favoured areas in unlikely to have similar effects on agriculture in less favoured areas is unlikely to have similar effects on agricultural growth even if the effects of agricultural growth on poverty remain similar unless conditions for irrigation are favourable or rainfall is sufficiently abundant and reliable this suggests that considerable caution may be needed in drawing policy conclusions from empirical analysis by state alone and without regard to their underlying f

why governments should invest more to educate girls abstract women and men often receive the same percentage increase in their wage rates with advances in schooling because these returns decline with more schooling the marginal returns for women will tend to exceed those for men especially in countries where women are much less educated the health and schooling of children are more closely related to their mother s education than father s more educated women work more hours in the market labor force broadening the tax base and thereby potentially reducing tax distortions these three conditions it is argued justify the disproportionate allocation of public expenditures toward women s education

measuring literacy some extensions of the basu foster framework abstract this note builds further on the ideas of basu and foster 1998 and is concerned to advance the measurement of literacy taking due note of its positive external effects in a simple economical and interpretation friendly fashion

an investigation of the labor market earnings of panamanian males evaluating sources of inequality this paper presents empirical evidence on the determinants of labor market earnings and inequality for males in panama using newly available microdata we estimate earnings equations based on the measurement framework of mincer 1974 and compare them with those for other countries at various stages of economic development we present evidence on two aspects of inequality in less developed economies labor market segmentation and social stratification we present tests of the segmentation hypothesis including several of the dual labor market hypotheses and discuss their inherent ambiguity we also present evidence on the importance of family background for earnings determination and educational attainment

measuring welfare poverty and inequality a class of poverty measures is identified the members of which satisfy strong monotonicity and transfer conditions these measures are closely related to indices of income inequality based on the notion of a mean equivalent income a restriction on the class of admissible measures allows poverty to be interpreted in terms of the loss in mean equivalent income resulting from the fact that some people are poor copyright 1987 by royal economic society

sinning in the basement what are the rules the ten commandments of applied econometrics unpleasant realities of real world data force applied econometricians to violate the prescriptions of econometric theory as taught by our textbooks leamer 1978 vividly describes this behavior as wanton sinning in the basement with sinners metamorphizing into high priests as they ascend to the third floor to teach econometric theory but this sinning is not completely wanton applied econometricians do or should follow some unwritten rules of behavior in effect bounding the sinning and promoting a brand of honor among sinners this paper exposits these rules and culls from them an unauthorized list of the ten commandments of applied econometrics

equity regarding poverty measures differences in needs and the role of equivalence scales the paper investigates the definition of equity regarding poverty measures when there are different household types in the population it demonstrates the implications of a between type regressive transfer principle for poverty measures for the choice of poverty lines and for the measurement of living standard the role of equivalence scales which are popular in empirical work on poverty measurement is clarified ce memoire examine la definition de mesures de pauvrete fondees sur l equite quand existent differents types de menages dans la population on montre les implications d un principe de transfert regressif entre types de menages pour les mesures de pauvrete pour la definition des seuils de pauvrete et pour la mesure du niveau de vie on clarifie le role des echelles d equivalence qui sont d un usage generalise dans les travaux sur la mesure de la pauvrete

shared literacy and employment in the nonfarm sector this article empirically examines the external effect of family literacy on the earnings of illiterate workers considering recent findings that rural nonfarm sectors in developing countries are becoming more important in determining the welfare of households this article tests two hypotheses 1 an illiterate person living with literate members i e a proximate illiterate person is more likely to find a job in the nonfarm sector than is an illiterate person living with no literate person i e an isolated illiterate person and 2 wage income of a proximate illiterate worker is higher than that of an isolated illiterate worker the empirical results suggest that proximate illiterate persons earn higher wages than isolated illiterate persons because they are more likely to be employed in the nonfarm sector

aggregate poverty measures the way poverty is measured is important for an understanding of what has happened to poverty as well as for anti poverty policy evaluation sen s 1976 pathfinding work has motivated many researchers to focus on the way poverty should be measured a poverty measure argued by sen should satisfy certain properties or axioms and the desirability of a poverty measure should be evaluated by these axioms during the last two decades many researchers have adopted the axiomatic approach pioneered by sen to propose additional axioms and develop alternative poverty measures the objective of this survey is to provide a clarification on the extensive literature of aggregate poverty measures in this survey we first examine the desirability of each axiom the properties of each poverty measure and the interrelationships among axioms the desirability of an axiom cannot be evaluated in isolation and some combination of axioms may make it impossible to devise a satisfactory poverty measure some axioms can be implied by other axioms combined and so are not independent some others are ad hoc and are disqualified as axioms for poverty measurement based on the interactions among axioms we identify the core axioms which together have a strong implication on the functional form of a poverty measure we then review poverty measures that have appeared in the literature evaluating the interrelationships among different measures and examining the properties of each measure the axioms each measure satisfies violates are also summarized in a tabular form several good poverty measures which have not been documented by previous surveys are also included

on the measurement of poverty official statistics in the united states and the united kingdom show a rise in poverty between the 1970 s and the 1980 s but scepticism has been expressed with regard to these findings in particular the methods employed in the measurement of poverty have been the subject of criticism this paper re examines three basic issues in measuring poverty the choice of the poverty line the index of poverty and the relation between poverty and inequality one general theme running through the paper is that there is a diversity of judgments which enter the measurement of poverty and that it is necessary to recognize these explicitly in the procedures adopted there is likely to be disagreement about the choice of poverty line affecting both its level and its structure in this situation we may only be able to make comparisons and not to measure differences and the comparisons may lead only to a partial rather than a complete ordering the first section of the paper discusses the stochastic dominance conditions which allow such comparisons illustrating their application by reference to data for the united states the choice of poverty measure has been the subject of an extensive literature and a variety of measures have been proposed in the second section of the paper a different approach is suggested considering a class of measures satisfying certain general properties and seeking conditions under which all members of the class which includes many of those proposed give the same ranking those sceptical about measures of poverty often assert that poverty and inequality are being confounded the third section of the paper distinguishes four different viewpoints and relates them to theories of justice and views of social welfare

literacy and intrahousehold externalities abstract the size of the intrahousehold externality created when a literate household member provides literacy services to illiterate members is estimated in this paper using a model of children s height for age in papua new guinea this externality appears to be large these results support the use of a new measure of literacy developed by basu and foster 1998 to take account of the gains when illiterates live in households where at least one person is literate regional rankings change when the new measure of literacy is used suggesting that policies guided by the usual measure of adult literacy may overlook an important pathway for human development

market opportunities genetic endowments and intrafamily resource distribution child survival in rural india the authors examine how intrafamily resource allocations respond to changes in economic conditions and to genetic differences in children by estimating the determinants of variations in the sex specific survival differentials of rural indian children based on standard census and household survey data they explore in particular the hypothesis that such differences are related to the relative returns to survival with households selectively allocating resources to children in response to variation in sex differences in their expected earnings opportunities as adults data are from the 1961 census and a 1971 household survey excerpt

work intensity gender and sustainable development abstract is labour intensive employment compatible with social justice and environmental sustainability this paper examines the question of how far small scale intermediate technology based on energy intensive human work which is central to prescriptions for poverty alleviation and sustainable development is compatible with development objectives emphasizing gender equity work intensity is a neglected characteristic of labour but significant in the determination of human well being and in the intra household distribution of welfare the intensification of energy expenditure does not affect men and women in a uniform way and needs to be gender disaggregated in order to reveal potential trade offs between development strategies based on labour intensive growth and the well being of men and women the paper draws upon the experience with treadle pumps for irrigation in bangladesh as an illustration of such potential trade offs and argues for more rigorous analyses of gender divisions of labour which include work intensity in combination with time allocation

poverty in canada and the united states measurement trends and implications although canada and the united states are two of the richest countries in the world many canadians and americans perceive themselves and are perceived by others to be poor which raises the issue of how best to measure poverty within canada there are widespread worries that the self image of canada as a place with relatively little poverty somewhat kinder and gentler than the united states may be a bit outdated see graves dugas and beauchamp 1999 angus reid 1999 poverty in canada has been rising while in the united states it has been falling in recent years which raises the issues of why that has been happening and what it will mean in the longer term for canada and the united states as a whole in this paper therefore i begin by asking how poverty in affluent countries should be measured before examining recent evidence on poverty intensity and its social significance in section 1 the use of the sen shorrocks thon index of poverty intensity is advocated and the poverty box is introduced as a summary graphical representation in section 2 recent data are presented on poverty in europe and north america and it is noted that between 1994 and 1997 canadian provinces became quite similar to many u s states in poverty intensity a fixed effects model is used in section 3 to examine whether changes in trade exposure the unemployment rate unemployment insurance and social assistance are significant determi

a note on a troublesome axiom for poverty indices in a recent article in this journal clark hemming and ulph i98i henceforth chu review the recent literature on welfare indices for the measurement of poverty and propose two new such indices the axiomatic approach to the measurement of poverty which was initiated by sen 1976 has been from the very beginning plagued with difficulties with the transfer axiom and chu s paper is not altogether immune we show that one of their two indices does not satisfy the axiom and we take this opportunity to complement their review with a few remarks in particular we show that the index proposed by kakwani ig80a has the same defect let y be a non negative income vector and z the poverty line the number of people with income no larger than the poverty line is q and the total population n assuming y y2 n y gi z yi i i q are the income gaps following chu the reader is referred to their paper for the motivation let us define the equally distributed equivalent income gap as

returns to investment in education a global update the author updates compilations of rate of return estimates to investment in education published since 1985 and discusses methodological issues surrounding those estimates some key patterns among the three main levels of education primary education continues to exhibit the highest social profitability in all world regions private returns are considerably higher than social returns because of the public subsidization of education the degree of public subsidy increases with the level of education which is regressive social and private returns at all levels generally decline by the level of a country s per capita income overall the returns to female education are higher than those to male education but at individual levels of education the pattern is more mixed the returns to the academic secondary school track are higher than the vocational track since unit cost of vocational education is much higher and the returns for those who work in the private competitive sector of the economy are higher than in the public noncompetitive sector and the returns in the self employment unregulated sector of the economy are higher than in the dependent employment sector controversies in the literature are discussed in the light of the new evidence the undisputable and universal positive correlation between education and earnings can be interpreted in many ways the causation issue on whether education really affects earnings can be answered only with experimental data generated by randomly exposing different people to various amounts of education given the fact that moral and pragmatic considerations prevent the generation of such pure data researchers have to make do with indirect inferences or natural experiments some have been attempted the author looks at the research on overeducation or surplus schooling the conclusions reinforce earlier patterns they confirm that primary education continues to be the number one investment priority in developing countries they also show that educating females is marginally more profitable than educating males that the academic secondary school curriculum is a better investment than the technical vocational tract and that the returns to education obey the same rules as investment in conventional capital that is they decline as investment is expanded