Welfare-Consistent Global Poverty Measures / Martin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ravallion, Martin.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Chen, Shaohua.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w23739.

NBER working paper series no. w23739

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2017.

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.

Notes:

Print version record

August 2017.