Multidimensional poverty measures can in theory make well-being comparisons that are less biased than those solely based on monetary poverty. However, multidimensional poverty measures suffer in practice...
The poverty line rule defines how the poverty line’s nominal monetary amount should be adjusted to prices and preferences. Official poverty lines are based on either of two main rules. “Objective” poverty...
Simple welfare indices such as mean income are ubiquitous but not distribution sensitive. In contrast, existing distribution sensitive welfare indices are rarely used, often because they are difficult...
Many developing countries’ official poverty methodologies rely on nonstandard poverty lines, which complicate poverty comparisons across space or time. The paper considers the case of the Arab Republic...
Poverty measures typically do not account for mortality, resulting in counter-intuitive evaluations. The reason is that they (i) suffer from a mortality paradox and (ii) do not attribute intrinsic value...
Multidimensional poverty measures are increasingly used in practice even though they face strong criticism and generate longlasting debates. These contentions primarily find their origin in the divergence...
This paper surveys the small branch of welfare economics that studies indicators combining poverty and mortality. The paper distinguishes two reasons for constructing such indicators. The first reason...
This paper reviews the debate opposing the absolute and relative approaches to monetary poverty measurement. The arguments for combining both approaches into a single “overall” monetary poverty measure...
There is growing support for monitoring global poverty using a measure that accounts for both own and relative income. This paper shows how—in the context of heterogeneous preferences over these factors—the...
This paper studies the optimal taxation of bequests in a model in which individuals have heterogeneous preferences over their consumption and the net-of-tax bequest received by their heir. The bequest...
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about massive declines in well-being around the world. This paper seeks to quantify and compare two important components of those losses—increased mortality and higher...
The authors evaluate the global welfare consequences of increases in mortality and poverty generated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Increases in mortality are measured in terms of the number of years of life...