Publications

This paper introduces a poverty index that incorporates poverty persistence as an integral part of poverty measurement within a multiperiod framework. Using familiar tools (logarithmic utilities and a utilitarian social welfare function) we obtain a mathematically straightforward poverty index, which can be interpreted as an estimate of the social cost of poverty. This index can be neatly decomposed into incidence, intensity, and inequality, and is additively decomposable by population subgroups. It consists of the log of the geometric mean of individual intertemporal utility losses.