The publication of this book is in large part due to the role of Canada's Inter national Development Research Center (IDRC) in encouraging policy-relevant research in the fields o f poverty and equity. The book has in particular benefit ted much from IDRC's support of two significant ventures, the Micro Impacts of Macro Economic and Adjustment Programs (MIMAP) and the Poverty and Economic Policy (PEP) international research network. We are most grateful to the IDRC for their continued and inspiring dedication, professionalism and vision in the field of development research. The Secretariat...

Recent theoretical and empirical studies have concluded that in order to be accurate, poverty and deprivation must be measured within a multidimensional framework that is consistent, efficient, and statistically robust.

The fuzzy sets approach to poverty measurement was developed in the early 1990s and continues to be refined by scholars of economics and sociology who find the traditional "monetary-only" indicators to be inadequate and arbitrary.

This volume brings together advanced thinking on the multidimensional measurement of poverty, including the theoretical...

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 range. As a collection they make the fundamental point that deep understanding of these phenomena requires both the micro and the macro perspectives together, utilizing the strengths of each but also the special insights that come when the two are linked together. After an overview section which contains...

Conceptualization and measurement of poverty have traditionally relied on purely economic approaches, with income or consumption as the only indicator. Multidimensional approaches have increasingly been used to understand poverty, but have yet to be fully operationalized.

This book uses factor analysis and structural equations modelling to develop a multidimensional framework that integrates capability and social inclusion as additional poverty indicators.

The empirical relevance of this methodological contribution is demonstrated through its application in the United...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in the Preface to his famous Discourse on Inequality that "I consider the subject of the following discourse as one of the most interesting questions philosophy can propose, and unhappily for us, one of the most thorny that philosophers can have to solve. For how shall we know the source of inequality between men, if we do not begin by knowing mankind?" (Rousseau, 1754). This citation of Rousseau appears in an article in Spanish where Dagum (2001), in the memory of whom this book is published, also cites Socrates who said that the only useful knowledge is that...

This book provides a synthesis of some recent issues and an up-to-date treatment of some of the major important issues in distributional analysis that I have covered in my previous book Ethical Social Index Numbers, which was widely accepted by students, teachers, researchers and practitioners in the area. Wide coverage of on-going and advanced topics and their analytical, articulate and authoritative p- sentation make the book theoretically and methodologically quite contemporary and inclusive, and highly responsive to the practical problems of recent concern. Since many countries of the...

Poverty is a paradoxical state. Recognizable in the eld for any sensitive observer who travels in remote rural areas and urban slums and meets marginalized people in a given society, poverty still remains a challenge to conceptual formalization and to measurement that is consistent with such formalization. The analysis of poverty is multidisciplinary. It goes from ethics to economics, from political science to human biology, and any type of measurement rests on mathematics. Moreover, poverty is multifaceted according to the types of deprivation, and it is also gender and age speci c. A vector...