More Relatively-Poor People in a Less Absolutely-Poor World
By Shaohua Chen, M. Ravallion. 2012
224 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Relative deprivation, shame and social exclusion can matter to the welfare of people everywhere. The authors argue that such social effects on welfare call for a reconsideration of how we assess global poverty, but they do not support standard measures of relative poverty. The paper argues instead for using a weakly-relative measure as the upper-bound complement to the lower-bound provided by a standard absolute measure. New estimates of global poverty are presented, drawing on 850 household surveys spanning 125 countries over 1981-2008. The absolute line is $1.25 a day at 2005 prices, while the relative line rises with the mean, at a gradient of 1:2 above $1.25 a day. The authors show that these parameter choices are consistent with cross-country data on national poverty lines. The results indicate that the incidence of both absolute and weakly-relative poverty in the developing world has been falling since the 1990s, but more slowly for the relative measure. While the number of absolutely poor has fallen, the number of relatively poor has changed little since the 1990s, and is higher in 2008 than 1981.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/94690ed5c2c88217ba9dc09be02a217e046a9b9f
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In Economics and Econometrics
- Leonardo Gasparini
- Joanna Chataway
- R. Hanlin
- Raphael Kaplinsky
- Facundo Alvaredo
- Gary Gereffi
- David L. Levy
- S. Ponte
In Sociology and Political Science
In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- Recent trends in inequality and poverty in developing countries (2013, methodology): “Alvaredo-Gasparini 29 Using data from PovcalNet, Chen and Ravallion (2012) report changes in the within component of the global mean-log deviation between 1981 and 2008.”
- Inclusive innovation: an architecture for policy development (2014, background): “Source: Poverty numbers from Chen and Ravallion (2010) and Sumner (2010).”