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Poverty reduction: the paradox of the endogenous poverty line

Author

Listed:
  • Louis de Mesnard

    (LEG - Laboratoire d'Economie et de Gestion - UB - Université de Bourgogne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract
When evaluating poverty, the relative poverty line may be considered as a percentage of the median income or it may be a percentage of the average income. It is proved that, with a poverty line relative to the median income, reducing poverty may become less costly in proportion to the total income as poverty increases (measured by the Sen, the Sen-Shorrocks- Thon or the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty indexes) by passing from a Lorenz concentration curve to another curve associated with more poverty. This is obviously a paradox, although a largely overlooked one. However, it is shown that the paradox vanishes if the poverty line is relative to the average income. The demonstration is both experimental (algebraic or numeric where necessary) based on families of non-intersecting concentration curves produced by various algebraic functions (power function, exponential function or elliptic function but also produced by the Pareto distribution) and it is analytic. One concludes that the poverty line should be relative to the average income rather than to the median income.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Louis de Mesnard, 2007. "Poverty reduction: the paradox of the endogenous poverty line," Post-Print halshs-00268954, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00268954
    as

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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Shaohua Chen & Martin Ravallion, 2013. "More Relatively-Poor People in a Less Absolutely-Poor World," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 59(1), pages 1-28, March.
    2. Ravallion, Martin & Chen, Shaohua, 2019. "Global poverty measurement when relative income matters," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 177(C), pages 1-1.
    3. DECERF, Benoit, 2014. "Income poverty measures with relative poverty lines," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2014022, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    4. Martin Ravallion, 2015. "The Luxembourg Income Study," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 13(4), pages 527-547, December.
    5. Wei Zou & Xiaopei Cheng & Zengzeng Fan & Chuhao Lin, 2023. "Measuring and Decomposing Relative Poverty in China," Land, MDPI, vol. 12(2), pages 1-24, January.
    6. Ravallion,Martin & Chen,Shaohua, 2017. "Welfare-consistent global poverty measures," Policy Research Working Paper Series 8170, The World Bank.
    7. Decerf,Benoit Marie A, 2022. "Absolute and Relative Poverty Measurement : A Survey," Policy Research Working Paper Series 10008, The World Bank.
    8. Zengzeng Fan & Wei Zou, 2023. "A Three-Component Decomposition of the Change in Relative Poverty: An Application to China," Land, MDPI, vol. 12(1), pages 1-15, January.
    9. Decerf, Benoit, 2017. "Why not consider that being absolutely poor is worse than being only relatively poor?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 152(C), pages 79-92.
    10. Martin Ravallion & Shaohua Chen, 2011. "Weakly Relative Poverty," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 93(4), pages 1251-1261, November.
    11. Decerf, B., 2015. "A new index combining the absolute and relative aspects of income poverty: Theory and application," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2015050, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    poverty; poverty line; poverty indices; median;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • I32 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Measurement and Analysis of Poverty

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