forest dependence and income distribution in a subsistence economy evidence from india abstract we examine an area of northern india where forestry acts to ameliorate the incidence of poverty and destitution though it does not otherwise contribute significantly to the reduction of income inequality the poor would be doubly disadvantaged without common property access to forest products conservation measures entailing curtailment in the right to common access pose a dilemma this issue is explored here

tariffs and load management the french experience the aim of an electric public utility is the optimum control of the electrical energy generating and consumption system consistency is required between the means of control at level of supply and the means of control at level of demand on the demand side marginal cost pricing is an efficient tool to achieve a good management this paper presents the french experience in this field

testing for poverty dominance an application to canada the paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices this helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across distributions the tests which can take into account the complex sampling procedures that are typically used by statistical agencies to generate household level surveys are implemented using the canadian survey of labour and income dynamics slid for 1996 1999 and 2002 although the yearly cumulative distribution functions cross at the lower tails of the distributions the more recent years tend to dominate earlier years for a relatively wide range of poverty lines failing to take into account slid s sampling variability as is sometimes done can inflate significantly one s confidence in ranking poverty taking into account slid s complex sampling design as has not been done before can also decrease substantially the range of poverty lines over which a poverty ranking can be inferred

inflation and the distribution of price changes this paper reconsiders the empirical evidence connecting inflation to its higher order moments in particular we examine the statistical properties of the observed positive correlation between the sample mean and the sample cross sectional skewness of price changes this correlation has attracted substantial attention over the years and has recently been the focal point of a debate among macroeconomists we show that the sample mean skewness correlation suffers from a small sample bias that accounts for the entirety of the observed correlation in other words we establish that one of the stylized facts in the literature on aggregate price behavior need not be a fact at all

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 household size the widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policy the scope for size economies in consumption cautions against this view we find that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0 6 this turns out to be the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food share method of setting scales by contrast some measures of child nutritional status indicate an elasticity of unity consideration of the weight attached to child versus adult welfare may help resolve the non robustness of demographic profiles of poverty excerpt

on shorrocks reinvestigation of the sen poverty index this paper demonstrates that the shorrocks econometrica 63 225 1230 1995 modification of the sen econometrica 44 219 231 1976 poverty index drops out as a particular case of the chakravarty canadian journal of economics 16 74 85 1983 general ethical index of poverty

poverty and inequality under income and price dispersions many policies simultaneously affect the distribution of prices and incomes in the economy moreover a bias may occur when there is a stochastic relationship between prices and incomes and this relationship is being ignored it is therefore important to dispose of an analytical framework for welfare analysis that could account for changes in this joint distribution how can the joint influences of price and income distributions on poverty and inequality indicators be analysed we offer a method to deal with this problem by using parametric formulae of poverty and inequality measures we propose statistical indicators for the levels variabilities and a statistical link of price indices and nominal living standards these indicators are consistent with an approximation of the problem based on a bivariate lognormal distribution of price indices and nominal living standards our analysis provides hints about the social welfare impact of economic shocks or policies affecting levels variabilities and correlation of prices and incomes intuitive insights are obtained while using arithmetic means and variances instead does not lead to illuminating results the role of price and income variabilities for poverty and inequality is more complex than generally expected with the possibility of several variation regimes empirical investigation of these statistics would guide social policies

revisiting the sen poverty index a modification of the official sen poverty index yields an index which is not only continous in individual incomes and consistent with the transfer axiom but also admits a geometric interpretation in terms of the area beneath a graph called the inverse generalized lorenz curve for normalized poverty gaps by jenkins and lambert 1993 or the poverty gap profile by shorrocks 1994

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

the measurement of inequality and poverty a policy maker s guide to the literature abstract mathematical measures of poverty and inequality embody values that reflect the historical political social intellectual and ethical forces prevalent at the time of their formulation so that policy makers may select measures of poverty and inequality that are consistent with their values it is important to make explicit the value judgements implicit in the measures models designed to measure poverty and inequality fall into four categories absolute poverty measures absolute income measures relative poverty measures and relative inequality measures this article examines the principal models within each category and discusses the assumptions limitations and values implicit in the models

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

cross sectional inflation asymmetries and core inflation a comment on bryan and cecchetti this paper reexamines the evidence relating core inflation to cross sectional inflation asymmetry using statistical measures that are robust to the criticism of bryan and cecchetti the results her

game theory approach to use of noncommercial power plants under time of use pricing the authors use the game theory approach for evaluating the impact of the introduction of customer owned noncommercial power plants ncp when time of use pricing is used various results from this analysis are derived some of which are that the conflict between ncp customer and the supplier forces the supplier to reduce the price of ncp customers perception of the situation in which they are involved in plays an important role in this conflict the game model analysis presented provides a detailed quantitative information on electricity prices and on the ways of using ncp

catastrophic medical expenditure risk we propose a measure of household exposure to particularly onerous medical expenses the measure can be decomposed into the probability that medical expenditure exceeds a threshold the loss due to predictably low consumption of other goods if it does and the further loss arising from the volatility of medical expenses above the threshold depending on the choice of threshold the measure is consistent with a model of reference dependent utility with loss aversion unlike the risk premium the measure is only sensitive to particularly high expenses and can identify households that expect to incur such expenses and would benefit from subsidised but not actuarially fair insurance an empirical illustration using data from seven asian countries demonstrates the importance of taking account of informal insurance and reveals clear differences in catastrophic medical expenditure risk across and within countries in general risk is higher among poorer rural and chronically ill populations

on the watts multidimensional poverty index and its decomposition summary the multidimensional extension of the watts poverty index may be expressed as a function of five determinants measuring respectively the impacts of what are defined in the paper as the watts poverty gap ratio the theil bourguignon index of inequality among the poor the overall headcount ratio the weights of the various dimensions and some measure of correlation between the various dimensions using the shapley decomposition we apply this index to world data on the per capita gdp life expectancy and literacy rates and derive the contributions of the five determinants defined above to the variation of this index during 1993 2002

concepts of poverty and the poverty line abstract various approaches adopted in developed economies to distinguishing between the poor and non poor to setting a poverty line are reviewed these include the budget standard food ratio official subjective and relative poverty line methods as well as the analysis of indicators of deprivation there has been significant progress in recent years in the degree of sophistication involved and a movement away from approaches with a quasi absolute background however all the methods face formidable problems at conceptual and empirical levels and no single approach is likely to dominate

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

chronic and transient poverty measurement and estimation with evidence from china abstract the paper contributes to the measurement of poverty and vulnerability in three ways first it proposes a new approach to separating poverty into chronic and transient components second it provides corrections for the statistical biases introduced when using a small number of periods to estimate the importance of vulnerability and transient poverty third it applies these tools to the measurement of chronic and transient poverty in china using a rich panel data set that extends over 17 years alternative measurement techniques are found to yield significantly different estimates of the relative importance of chronic and transient poverty the precision of the estimates is also considerably enhanced by simple statistical corrections

a class of generalized sen poverty indices utilizing results from partial poverty orderings we characterize a class of generalized sen poverty indices a generalized sen poverty index is defined as the weighted area between the line of zero poverty and the censored generalized lorenz curve unlike the original sen index the generalized sen index can satisfy the key axioms for poverty measurement

flexible strategies for load demand management using dynamic pricing the need for and potential role of flexible pricing options which offer an efficient means for achieving a utility s load demand management objectives are discussed the focus is on dynamic tariffs by incorporating real time features within one or more key parameters of the tariff such pricing options can be tailored to offer the degree of flexibility that is necessary and cost effective for achieving the given demand management objective s

relative price changes as aggregate supply shocks this paper proposes a theory of supply shocks or shifts in the short run phillips curve based on relative price changes and frictions in nominal price adjustment when price adjustment is costly firms adjust to large shocks but not to small shocks and so large shocks have disproportionate effects on the price level therefore aggregate inflation depends on the distribution of relative price changes inflation rises when the distribution is skewed to the right and falls when the distribution is skewed to the left we show that this theoretical result explains a large fraction of movements in postwar u s inflation moreover our model suggests measures of supply shocks that perform better than traditional measures such as the relative prices of food and energy

dynamic poverty decomposition analysis an application to the philippines summary in this paper we propose a new method of poverty decomposition our method remedies the shortcomings of existing methods and has some desirable properties such as time reversion consistency and subperiod additivity our decomposition integrates the existing methods of growth redistribution decomposition and sector based decomposition because it allows us to decompose the change in poverty into growth and redistribution components for each group e g regions or sectors in the economy our decomposition works well in cases where only partial data are available for some periods it is also flexible and can be extended to have the following six components population shift within region redistribution between region redistribution nominal growth inflation and methodological change components the empirical application of the six way decomposition to the philippines for the period 1985 2009 shows that important policies for poverty reduction may differ across regions for example the autonomous region in muslim mindanao would need growth enhancing policies whereas eastern visayas would need policies to improve the income distribution our decomposition method has a wide applicability and may complement the poverty profile approach

time of use pricing for load management programs in taiwan power company load management programs have been actively performed by the utilities to reduce peak demand and improve system load factor in recent years the time of use tou tariff based on the peak load pricing theory has been one of the most effective load management strategies proper tou rate structure can actually reflect the generation cost of electricity supplying and give a guideline for customers to modify the power consumption pattern so that the system load factor can be improved the inverse electricity pricing rule can be applied as the basis of tou pricing in this paper the price elasticities of industrial customers of taipower system are solved by the statistical regression model with 2620 data samples

assessing deprivation with an ordinal variable theory and application to sanitation deprivation in bangladesh the challenges associated with poverty measurement with a cardinal variable have received due attention during the last four decades but there is a dearth of literature studying how to meaningfully assess poverty with an ordinal variable this paper first proposes a class of simple intuitive and policy relevant poverty measures for ordinal variables these measures are sensitive to depth of deprivations unlike the headcount ratio moreover under appropriate restrictions the measures ensure that priority is given to the poorest among the poor while targeting monitoring and evaluating poverty alleviation programs to assess the robustness of poverty comparisons to alternative choices of parameters various stochastic dominance tests are developed some of which are themselves novel contributions to the stochastic dominance literature the empirical illustration documenting changes in sanitation deprivation in bangladesh showcases the measures ability to identify instances in which overall sanitation deprivation improved while leaving the poorest behind

issues in measuring and modeling poverty economists have relied heavily on household incomes or expenditures normalized for differences in household specific prices and demographics in their research and policy advice related to poverty and inequality recognizing the conceptual and empirical problems that confound such measures does not mean that they should be ignored instead it indicates the need for supplementary measures to capture the missing items implementing a genuinely multidimensional approach will often make the welfare rankings of social states more difficult but that fact points to the nonrobustness of low dimensional rankings this may have its own policy ramifications with the possibility of correspondence between policy instruments and welfare objectives the model types used to understand the poverty and inequity determination processes will be affected not only will there be more dependent variables to consider but variables will have potentially complex relationships these relationships will often be hard to empirically disentangle despite richer integrated and longitudinal data sets such data open rich and relevant agenda for research into the dynamics of poverty along multiple dimensions a simultaneous attack on these issues from all three fronts measurement modeling and data offers hope of establishing a credible empirical foundation for public action in fighting poverty

an axiomatic characterization of the watts poverty index abstract although the first distribution sensitive decomposable poverty index the watts index has long been neglected by the profession even when it was searching for a decomposable index this neglect is due partly to the lack of an axiomatic characterization for the watts index this paper adopts an axiomatic approach and complements the watts index with such a characterization under a set of reasonable axioms the watts index is the unique index if a poverty index is perceived as the absolute amount of social welfare loss due to poverty the watts index is relatively easy to apply it also satisfies all basic axioms for a good poverty index

poverty dominant program reforms the role of targeting and allocation rules we propose simple graphical methods to identify poverty reducing marginal reforms of transfer programs the methods are based on program dominance curves that display cumulative program benefits weighted by powers of poverty gaps these curves can be decomposed simply as sums of targeting dominance curves and allocation dominance ones and can serve to verify whether the assessment of marginal program reforms is sensitive to the choice of poverty lines and poverty measures as well as to differences across programs in revenue sources and incentive effects

discontinuous losses from poverty generalized pα measures and optimal transfers to the poor abstract this paper examines the distributional properties of poverty measures which are discontinuous at the poverty line it is shown that among all the additive poverty measures only those measures with some discontinuous jump at the poverty line are such that it is optimal to allocate a given antipoverty budget either to the richest of the poor or to the poorest of the poor or to both a special class of such poverty measures is an extension of the well known p the properties of which are investigated

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

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

a re count of poverty in us central cities just who and where are the urban poor poverty remains a persistent problem in central cities across the us and the government s approach to measuring it is not without shortcomings this paper applies recently developed innovations in poverty measurement and presents improved estimates of central city poverty across time a broader and more comprehensive income concept is employed to measure family resources and important distributional aspects of poverty are incorporated by using the sen index in general sen indexes for the central city are significantly reduced when comprehensive income is used to evaluate poverty motivating these changes are the substantial reductions that occur in the depth of poverty and the relative income inequality among poor central city residents regionally the results suggest that the elements of comprehensive income have their greatest impact on estimates of poverty in southern central cities while the central cities of the west are least affected

subjective economic welfare beyond growth it is common that economists are used to establish a direct relationship between growth and welfare nevertheless the link among these variables not always is so virtuous this suspicion went in the last years to investigating about the perception of people on your proper welfare the slogan was to know if the positive variations in the growth the revenue or the employment generate earnings of welfare it is necessary to consult the individuals the subjective studies of welfare increased substantially since then confirming the suspicions improvements in the objective indicators of welfare not always are perceived as such by the individuals the intention of this work will be to develop an index of economic welfare that allows measure the welfare perceived by the population the results obtained in the argentine economy between 2005 and 2008 will be presented and his results will be compared with the evolution of the objective indicators

evaluation of the marginal outage costs of generating systems for the purposes of spot pricing this paper describes a methodology based on quantitative power system reliability evaluation for calculating the marginal outage costs of generating systems the proposed method involves the calculation of the incremental expected unserved energy at a given operating reserve level and lead time and the multiplication of this value by the interrupted energy assessment rate of the system the method is illustrated in this paper by calculating the marginal outage cost profile of the ieee reliability test system and by examining the effect of various modeling assumptions on that profile

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

equity and policy effectiveness with imperfect targeting abstract we propose a general approach that jointly integrates horizontal and vertical equity criteria in the assessment of poverty alleviation programs with the strength of each criterion being captured through its own inequity aversion parameter this contrasts with the assessment of poverty alleviation programs done with simple under coverage and leakage ratios or with other methods that do not take into account the heterogeneity of the poor and that do not address directly the social benefits of achieving normative criteria our methodology is illustrated using tunisian data and two alternative poverty alleviation policies we find inter alia that the social ranking of commodity and socio demographic targeting in tunisia depends on the policymaker s comparative preference for vertical and horizontal equity

gender and multidimensional poverty in nicaragua an individual based approach most existing empirical papers concerned about multidimensional poverty use the household as the unit of analysis so that the multidimensional poverty status of the household is equated with the multidimensional poverty status of all its members this assumption ignores intra household inequalities additionally households containing both a female and a male cannot contribute to a gender gap in poverty so gender differentials in poverty cannot be estimated but the sustainable development goals have put special emphasis on gender equality therefore new measures able to capture the gender differences are needed consequently in this paper we propose an individual based multidimensional poverty measure in order to estimate the three i s of multidimensional poverty incidence intensity and inequality in nicaragua as well as the gender differentials we also estimate logit regressions to better understanding the determinants of multidimensional poverty in this country overall we find that there are statistically significant gender differences in multidimensional poverty in nicaragua but they are estimated to be small and lower than 5 however the gender differential in inequality is larger than 10 and it suggests that multi dimensionally poor women are living in very intense poverty when compared with multi dimensionally poor men we also find that the elderly and children are the most vulnerable people in terms of multidimensional poverty in this country furthermore when information on employment domestic work and social protection is considered in the analysis the gender gaps become more substantial and women are more likely to be poor than men

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

minimum distribution sensitivity poverty aversion and poverty orderings abstract this paper introduces a measure of distribution sensitivity which is similar to arrow pratt s measure of risk aversion for a poverty index the measure also gauges poverty aversion and has a clear and straightforward interpretation using this measure we can define various classes of minimum distribution sensitive poverty indices we show that the ordering condition for such a class of poverty indices is simply a generalized poverty deprivation profile dominance properties and implications of this dominance condition are analyzed and poverty orderings by different classes of poverty measures are compared journal of economic literature classification number i32