This paper shows that Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty indices can be written as the product of components summarizing the incidence, intensity and inequality dimensions of poverty and provides an empirical illustration of the decomposition using Spanish household budget surveys data.

In this paper we introduce a new family of poverty measures for comparing and ordering social situations. The aggregation scheme of these poverty measures is based on the exponential means. The poverty measures introduced satisfy interesting properties and their dual decomposition provides a factorization of the proposed indices into three underlying factors: incidence, intensity and inequality among the poor.

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This paper explores the implications of using multidimensional majorization criteria to derive inequality measures, without taking into consideration the idea behind the Pigou-Dalton principle, in the sense that if a richer person transfers something of at least one attribute to a poorer person the inequality falls. A new and basic criterion proposed by Fleurbaey and Trannoy (2003) which generalizes this idea to the multidimensional framework is explored, and its logical relationships with the dominance criteria that exist in the literature are analyzed. The paper also surveys the existent multidimensional inequality indices in order to see whether they meet this new criterion.

Many polarization measures proposed in the literature assume some invariance condition. Clearly, each invariance condition imposes a specific value judgment on polarization measurement. In inequality and poverty measurement, B. Zheng suggests rejecting these invariance conditions as axioms, and proposes replacing them with the unit-consistency axiom. This property demands that the inequality or poverty rankings, rather than their cardinal values, are not altered when income is measured in different monetary units. Following Zheng's proposal we explore the consequences of the unit-consistency axiom in the bipolarization field. We introduce a new family of Krtscha-type intermediate bipolarization indices, and also propose and characterize a class of intermediate polarization orderings which are unit-consistent. Finally, a short empirical application using data from Spain is also provided to illustrate how the bipolarization orderings proposed may be used in practice. Copyright 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation International Association for Research in Income and Wealth 2009.