The Study On The Measurement Of Poverty

As one of"3P"problems, poverty has become a major obstacle to economic development and social stability. However, the study and analysis on poverty in China is not as well done as expected, and no attention had been paid to the measurement of poverty only a short time ago. On the other hand, the poverty measurement is a basic issue in poverty research, for any errors in poverty measurement may lead us to go far away from the right direction to solve the poverty problem. Therefore, the study for poverty measurement is of great importance, not only because it is the foundation to estimate the situation of poverty, but also because it provides us the technical supports for choosing correctly and implementing effectively the anti-poverty strategies.The paper is divided into four parts. In the first part, we give the concept of poverty from two aspects, the intension and the extension. We discuss the poverty measurement on"income space"in most cases, including identification and aggregation of poverty. In the second part, for the purpose of poverty identification, we elaborate the poverty line and its types. By incorporating its determinants, i.e. minimum demand, income and other factors, the problem to choose poverty line is explored. We explained some popular methods to determine a poverty line, that is, shopping basket method, Engle's ratio method, international poverty line standard and life style method. In the third part, we are devoted to the poverty aggregation. First, we use an axiomatic framework for measurement to analyze the traditional measures, then we study an extremely important comprehensive measure of poverty—the Sen index and some improved index based on the S measure by other scholars, such as SST measure and FGT index. In the fourth part, we examine how to construct a poverty measure suitable to China. Especially, we propose a new aggregation index, which is similar to S measure in formulation but has some properties S measure fail to satisfy. Moreover, the problem about the expansion of space is also discussed in this part, and, at the end of this paper, the summary of the basic ideas of poverty measurement, namely the thought of integration and the that of intersection quasi-orderings, is given.