If the absolute number of poor people goes up, but the fraction of people in poverty comes down, has poverty gone up or gone down? The economist’s instinct, framed by population replication axioms that undergird standard measures of poverty, is to say that in this case poverty has gone down....

This commentary poses a series of progressively harder questions in the economic analysis of growth, inequality and poverty. Starting with relatively straightforward analysis of the relationship between growth and inequality, the first level of hard questions come when we ask what policies and...

This collection of essays honors a remarkable man and his work. Erik Thorbecke has made significant contributions to the microeconomic and the macroeconomic analysis of poverty, inequality and development, ranging from theory to empirics and policy. The essays in this volume display the same...

The dominant perspective in discussions of labor and environmental standards and globalization is that of North-South competition and its impact on Northern standards. This paper presents an alternative perspective, that of South-South competition to export to the North, and its impact on...

This paper considers the evolution ofthinking about poverty since Rowntree's classic study ofpoverty in England at the turn ofthe last century. It highlights the progressive broadening ofthe definition and measurement ofpoverty, from command over market-purchased goods (income) to other...

This paper applies a partial identication approach to poverty measurement when data errors are non-classical in the sense that it is not assumed that the error is statistically independent of the outcome of interest, and the error distribution has a mass point at zero. This paper shows that it...

This paper investigates the reasons why inequality, and distribution more generally, have come to the fore in the development discourse at the tum of the century, after a period of relative neglect in the 1980s. The paper considers, in particular the analysis of (a) efficiency and equity, (b)...

This study illustrates a methodology to measure empirically household food vulnerability. Food vulnerability is defined in terms of the probability now of being undernourished in the future. The empirical analysis is based on panel data from northern Mali, collected in 1997-98. Our empirical...