Welfare-Consistent Global Poverty Measures

Ravallion, Martin ; Chen, Shaohua

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: POVERTY LINE;    RELATIVE INCOME;    INEQUALITY;    GLOBAL POVERTY;    POVERTY REDUCTION;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-8170
RP-ID  :  WPS8170

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

The paper provides new measures ofglobal poverty that take seriously the idea ofrelative-income comparisons but also acknowledge a deepidentification problem when the latent norms definingpoverty vary systematically across countries.Welfare-consistent measures are shown to be bounded below bya fixed absolute line and above by weakly-relative linesderived from a theoretical model of relative-incomecomparisons calibrated to data on national poverty lines.Both bounds indicate falling global poverty incidence, butmore slowly for the upper bound. Either way, the developingworld has a higher poverty incidence but is making moreprogress against poverty than the developed world.