Publication Details

Chronic poverty and aggregation

James Foster
2006

Abstract

This paper presents a new family of chronic poverty measures based on the Pa poverty measures of Foster, Greer,and Thorbecke (1984). The chronically poor are identified using two cutoffs: a standard poverty line, which identifies the time periods during which a person is poor; and a duration cutoff, which is the minimum percentage of time a person must be in poverty in order to be chronically poor. The new family of chronic poverty measures is constructed by raising the (per-period) normalized gaps of the chronically poor to a power a > 0 and then aggregating. The resulting indices, which can be viewed as duration adjusted Pa measures, satisfy a battery of properties for chronic poverty indices, including time monotonicity and population ecomposability. An illustrative application of the family is provided using data from Argentina.

Publication Type(s)

Conference Paper

Conference: Concepts and Methods for Analysing Poverty Dynamics and Chronic Poverty

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