A Class of Chronic Poverty Measures
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Date
2007
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Vanderbilt University
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 decomposability. An illustrative application of the family is provided using data from Argentina.
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Keywords
Chronic Poverty, Distribution, Measurement, Axioms, JEL Classification Number: I32, JEL Classification Number: D63, JEL Classification Number: D31