On intertemporal poverty measures: the role of affluence and want

Abstract

This paper proposes classes of intertemporal poverty measures which take into account both the debilitating impact of prolonged spells in poverty and the mitigating e¤ect of periods of a-uence on subsequent poverty. The weight assigned to the level of poverty in each time period depends on the length of the preceding spell of poverty or of non-poverty. The proposed classes of intertemporal poverty measures are quite general and allow for a range of possible judgements as to the overall impact on a poor period of preceding spells of poverty or a-uence. We discuss the properties of the proposed classes of measures and axiomatically characterize these measures.

Intertemporal deprivation in rural china: income and nutrition

“…Following Dutta et al (2013), an intertemporal poverty measure is a function which assigns to an individual's (or household's) poverty profile, in the given dimension, a non-negative number, i.e. P : Dutta et al (2013) proposed and provided axiomatic characterisations for two classes of measures, their 'constant-relative affluence-dependent' intertemporal poverty measure P R , and their 'relative affluence-dependent' intertemporal poverty measureP R . (See Appendix A for details of the measures and parameters).…”

“…9 The main difference between them is that with P R , the mitigating effect of non-poor periods depends only on the length of time a household has been non-poor for, while withP R , the extent of this mitigating effect can be increased if households are far above the poverty line when they are non-poor. Dutta et al (2013) justify their approach by arguing that periods of affluence allow people to accumulate valuable resources that help mitigate the deprivation experienced in subsequent poor spells. Implicit in their approach is that, ".…”

“…Yet there is scope for a variety of views on how best to aggregate such information and there are a fast growing number of methodologies. These include Foster (2009), who accounts for the detrimental impact of spending a high proportion of time in poverty on the overall level of chronic poverty; Hoy and Zheng (2011), who account, among other things, for the particularly damaging impact of poverty early in life on capability or human capital formation, resulting in low long-term wellbeing, in the context of lifetime poverty; Bossert et al (2012), who attach importance to the debilitating impact of prolonged periods spent in poverty, and Dutta et al (2013), who incorporate also the mitigating impact that affluent spells might have on subsequent periods of poverty. 3 While much progress has been made in measuring poverty both across dimensions, and over time, attempts to simultaneously account for multi-dimensional and intertemporal aspects of poverty in its measurement are in their infancy.…”

“…Empirically, our interest is in shedding light on poverty, and its possible determinants, in two poor regions of rural northwest China -Gansu and Inner Mongolia. Using the measures of Dutta et al (2013), we capture poverty as intertemporal deprivations in two important aspects of wellbeing -income and nutrition. 5 There have been relatively few studies of income poverty in rural China which explicitly account for its temporal aspect.…”

“…We apply poverty indices proposed by Dutta et al (2013) to a sample of Chinese rural households. These measures have a number of appealing features.…”