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A number of multidimensional poverty measures that respect the ordinal nature of dimensions have recently been proposed within the counting approach framework. Besides ensuring a reduction in poverty, however, it is important to monitor distributional changes to ensure that poverty reduction has been inclusive in reaching the poorest. Distributional issues are typically captured by adjusting a poverty measure to be sensitive to inequality among the poor. This approach, however, has certain practical and conceptual limitations. It conflicts, for example, with some policy-relevant measurement features, such as the ability to decompose a measure into dimensions post-identification and does not create an appropriate framework for assessing disparity in poverty across population subgroups. In this chapter, we propose and justify the use of a separate decomposable inequality measure – a positive multiple of “variance” – to capture the distribution of deprivations among the poor and to assess disparity in poverty across population subgroups. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach through two contrasting inter-temporal illustrations using Demographic Health Survey data sets for Haiti and India.

This paper investigates the effect of reducing inequality in household education, health and access to credit on pro-poor growth in Cameroon using the 2001 and 2007 Cameroon household consumption surveys. Results indicate that education and access to credit registered relative pro-poor growth driven by a fall in inequality. However, health failed to record pro-poor growth due to an increase in health-inequality at the bottom of the welfare distribution. In addition, equalizing education, health and access to credit among households, would increase average growth in household spending and pro-poor growth.

Regional minimum income (RMI) schemes have been a fundamental tool for fighting poverty in Spain at a regional level. However, the redistributive power of these schemes has not been as effective as was expected in reducing inequality during the last decades. On the other hand, the introduction of the new ‘Minimum Vital Income’ (MVI) by the Spanish Central Government represents a novel measure for fighting poverty, by guaranteeing minimum incomes from a national perspective as a policy response to the asymmetric impact of the COVID-19 crisis upon income distribution. Using EUROMOD,¹ this paper simulates both the distributional effects of the introduction of the MVI and what the effects on inequality and poverty in each Spanish region would be if the national scheme were to substitute the current regional schemes. The results referring to MVI introduction indicate that inequality and poverty would decrease in all dimensions: incidence, intensity, and inequality among the poor (Foster–Greer–Thorbecke poverty measures). Additionally, the negative effects of RMI elimination would be offset by the positive effects of MVI introduction for most regions, leading us to consider that the simulated scenario entails better redistributive results, as well as additional savings for Spanish Public Accounts, in a context of growing debt. Our findings can provide public policy-makers with useful information about the convenience of fighting poverty at a national level as regards distribution and revenue.

In the post-WTO era, the volume of international trade has grown in a good amount in India. At the same time, the continuous lowering and removing of the trade barriers of different forms create several impacts on poverty and inequality. In this chapter, we tried to capture the issues of inequality, specially the gender inequality, which has worsened a lot in the last two decades. In one side, trade openness enhanced the growth, but at the cost of increasing inequality. Theil index and Atkinson index both show an increasing trend of inequality. The Gender Inequality Index (GII) and the Inequality-adjusted Human Development or Gender Development Indices are also showing increasing inequality. The state-wise analysis of such inequality indices is varying a lot over the study period. This chapter throws some insight into these issues and concludes that in the post-WTO era income inequality has increased a lot with a very few exceptions. In some states (like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, and Punjab) only export have increased the employment in the unorganized sectors. The study concludes that exports have generated additional employment and incomes in the economy, but these gains have not trickled down to the poor. The study is confined to Indian cases only and covers the time period 2000–2001 to 2018–2019.

Purpose: Most of the characterizations of inequality or poverty indices assume some invariance condition, be that scale, translation, or intermediate, which imposes value judgments on the measurement. In the unidimensional approach, Zheng (2007a, 2007b) suggests replacing all these properties with the unit-consistency axiom, which requires that the inequality or poverty rankings, rather than their cardinal values, are not altered when income is measured in different monetary units. The aim of this paper is to introduce a multidimensional generalization of this axiom and characterize classes of multidimensional inequality and poverty measures that are unit consistent.

Design/methodology/approach: Zheng (2007a, 2007b) characterizes families of inequality and poverty measures that fulfil the unit-consistency axiom. Tsui (1999, 2002), in turn, derives families of the multidimensional relative inequality and poverty measures. Both of these contributions are the background taken to achieve our characterization results.

Findings: This paper merges these two generalizations to identify the canonical forms of all the multidimensional subgroup- and unit-consistent inequality and poverty measures. The inequality families we derive are generalizations of both the Zheng and Tsui inequality families. The poverty indices presented are generalizations of Tsui's relative poverty families as well as the families identified by Zheng.

Originality/value: The inequality and poverty families characterized in this paper are unit and subgroup consistent, both of them being appropriate requirements in empirical applications in which inequality or poverty in a population split into groups is measured. Then, in empirical applications, it makes sense to choose measures from the families we derive.

The impacts of median income and other variables on the Sen index of poverty in the United States are investigated using panel data with fixed time period and cross sectional effects. Estimates for the Sen index and its decomposed components – the headcount ratio, poverty gap ratio, and Gini coefficient among the poor reveal that median income among state/regions and across time systematically influences the Sen index and each of its components. However, the results reveal that labor market and demographic control variables have quite different effects on the distinct components of the Sen index.

Post reform India has generated high economic growth, yet progress in income poverty and many other key development outcomes has been modest. This chapter primarily examines how inclusive economic growth has been in India between 2005–2006 and 2015–2016 in reducing multidimensional poverty captured by the global multidimensional poverty index (MPI). The authors employ a constellation of elasticity and semi-elasticity measures to examine vertical, horizontal as well as dimensional inclusiveness of economic growth. Nationally, the authors estimate that a 1% annual economic growth in India during their study period is associated with an annual reduction in MPI of 1.34%. The association of the national growth to state poverty reduction (horizontal inclusiveness) is, however, not uniform. Some states have been successful in reducing poverty faster than the national average despite slower economic growth between 2005–2005 and 2015–2016; whereas, other states have been less successful to do so despite faster economic growth during the same period. The authors’ analyses and findings show how these tools may be used in practical applications to measure inclusive growth and inform policy.

Following Ahmad and Stern (1984) a number of papers have been devoted to the analysis and the application of revenue-neutral and welfare-enhancing marginal commodity tax reforms. A recent stream of literature has investigated poverty-reducing commodity tax reforms using specific poverty measures. Here we derive the conditions under which a revenue-neutral marginal commodity tax reform increases the mean income of the poor and generates Lorenz-dominance of post-tax with respect to pre-tax distribution of equivalent income among the poor. These conditions are easy to interpret and not particularly difficult to apply.

In the unidimensional poverty field, a number of axioms capture the distribution sensitivity among the poor. One of them is the monotonicity sensitivity axiom that demands that a poverty measure should be more sensitive to a reduction in the income of a poor person, the poorer that person is. On the other hand, the minimal transfer axiom requires poverty to decrease when a transfer of income is made from a poor person to a poorer one. These axioms turn out to be identical, but they provide different and interesting interpretations. Both of them rely deeply on the income-ranking of the poor.

Some generalizations of the minimal transfer axiom and its variations have been proposed in the multidimensional framework. In none of them the partial ordering of the poor is taken into account. No counterpart of the monotonicity sensitivity axiom exists.

This note introduces multidimensional generalizations of the two mentioned axioms, keeping the crucial assumption that only when the poor involved are unambiguously ranked are the axioms uncontroversial. We show that the two generalizations proposed are also identical in the multidimensional setting although offering different interpretations. Relationships between the new properties and those existing in the literature are analyzed.