Introduction

Thinking about inequality usually invites, at least in passing, thinking about poverty. It seems reasonable to suppose that people who are sensitive to inequality are not going to be indifferent to the existence of poverty, nor vice versa. This suggests that there may be considerable advantage in pursuing an approach to the analysis of poverty comparisons that is similar to those of inequality or social welfare comparisons. In this chapter we will examine how the issue of poverty may be addressed using the techniques that we applied to the subject of inequality in chapter 4. Two steps are involved.

First we need to make precise what we mean by ‘poverty’ in principle. As with the theoretical approach to inequality that we described in chapter 2 this step resolves into imputing meaning to a type of distributional comparison. To do this, we again introduce a system of axioms by which such comparisons may coherently be made, in this case the axioms that are sometimes used to provide a formal basis for commonly used poverty measures. Once this system of axioms is established we examine some basic propositions about poverty comparisons using this system.