Discontinuous losses from poverty, generalized Pα measures, and optimal transfers to the poor

François Bourguignon; Gary Fields

doi:10.1016/S0047-2727(96)01589-7

Discontinuous losses from poverty, generalized P_α measures, and optimal transfers to the poor

François Bourguignon, Gary Fields

Economics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

This paper examines the distributional properties of poverty measures which are discontinuous at the poverty line. It is shown that among all the additive poverty measures, only those measures with some discontinuous jump at the poverty line are such that it is optimal to allocate a given antipoverty budget either to the richest of the poor, or to the poorest of the poor, or to both. A special class of such poverty measures is an extension of the well-known P_α, the properties of which are investigated.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	155-175
Number of pages	21
Journal	Journal of Public Economics
Volume	63
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/S0047-2727(96)01589-7
State	Published - Jan 1997

Keywords

Antipoverty policy
Poverty index

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Finance
Economics and Econometrics

Access to Document

10.1016/S0047-2727(96)01589-7

Cite this

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