Premature mortality and poverty measurment

Mortality and counting the poor

In the presence of premature mortality for the poorer sections of the population, standard snapshot poverty measures will show a decrease. To avoid this welfare measurement paradox, in this paper the authors develop and characterise a poverty measure based on the life time income profile of an individual.

This measure does not exhibit such paradoxical behaviour but one can further modify this measure, defining it on a normative rather than actual life time of the individuals so that premature mortality of the poor actually effects the poverty measure positively.

The authors characterise and illustrate such a measure here and indicate how to compute this measure in practise in a simple fashion.

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Premature mortality and poverty measurment