Review of Income and Wealth · 1979 · 274 citations · 0 references
Social SciencesDevelopment StudiesEconomicsDevelopment EconomicsPoverty PolicyPublic EconomicsIncome DistributionPovertyWelfare EconomicsWelfare IndicatorsMultidimensional PovertyPoverty Alleviation PolicyPoverty EconomicsPoverty IndicatorsPoverty LinesPoverty Thresholds
This paper investigates the properties of various measures of poverty and of the “difficulty of alleviation of poverty”. It is found that the ranking properties of both kinds of indices can be quite counter‐intuitive and that they could be misleading if used for policy evaluation. An alternative index is proposed; it is compared to the other indices and seems to fare rather well. To illustrate, a special reference is made to S. Anand's recent article on poverty in Malaysia.