Weakly Relative Poverty

By M. Ravallion, Shaohua Chen. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2009

230 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Prevailing measures of relative poverty are unchanged when all incomes grow or contract by the same proportion. This property stems from seemingly implausible assumptions about the disutility of relative deprivation and the cost of social inclusion. We propose “weakly relative” lines that relax these assumptions. On calibrating our measures to national poverty lines and survey data, we find that half the population of the developing world in 2005 lived in poverty, only half of whom were absolutely poor. The total number of poor rose over 1981 to 2005 despite falling numbers of absolutely poor. With sustained economic growth, the incidence of relative poverty became less responsive to further growth. The number of relatively poor rose, just as the numbers of absolutely poor fell.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/22629abc0c6a0bc3840d66c6e76cbc668583b2b3

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Citations in the corpus

Middle-Income Traps: A Conceptual and Empirical Survey (2015, background): “The stagnation in per capita GDP levels also relates to the literature on 5 For a new “weakly relative” measure that makes an explicit accounting for social cohesion, see Ravallion and Chen (2011).”
Inequality and Globalization: A Review Essay (2018, background): “…for global inequality.35 Ravallion (2017) proposes a tractable approach to measuring global 34 Atkinson and Bourguignon (2001) provided such a concept for global poverty measurement and a generalized version with a global empirical implementation has been developed by Ravallion and Chen (2011).”
The Foster–Greer–Thorbecke (FGT) poverty measures: 25 years later (2010, methodology): “Some progress in this direction includes work by Ali and Thorbecke [1], Atkinson and Bourguignon [10], Foster [56], and Ravallion and Chen [107]; for a treatment of a related line of research in the measurement of welfare, see Atkinson and Brandolini [11].”
More Relatively-Poor People in a Less Absolutely-Poor World (2012, unknown): “‖ Weakly relative measures are consistent with the relativist gradient, as shown by Ravallion and Chen (2011).”