Mardi | 2009-03-10

Bresson FLORENT – Isabelle RABAUD

The present paper defines an axiomatic framework for multidimensional povertymeasurement that fits a weak version of the focus axiom and is consistentwith Duclos, Sahn, and Younger’s (2006) “well-being” approach of poverty identification.This slackening of the tradtional axiomatic framework is appealing fortwo reasons. First, regarding the issue of poverty identification, the approach isless restrictive than the traditional “union” and “intersection” views. Secondly,concerning the issue of aggregation among attributes for each individual, it allowsfor substitution effects between meagre and non-meagre attributes as wellas the existence of varying needs considerations. As an illustration of these developments,we introduce two extensions of family of multidimensional povertyindices defined by Bourguignon and Chakravarty (2003).