PHA-Exchange> Premature Mortality and Poverty Measurement

[claudio]

> Premature Mortality and Poverty Measurement
>
> Ravi Kanbur, Department of Economics, Cornell University, NY, USA >
Diganta Mukherjee, Economic Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute,
Kolkata, India
> Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex,
Colchester,  UK
>
> ISER Working Papers - March 2003 - Number 2003-6

> Available online as PDF file [26p.]at:
> http://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/pubs/workpaps/pdf/2003-06.pdf
>
> "........There is a glaring paradox in all commonly used measures of
> poverty. The death of a poor person reduces poverty according to these
> measures. This surely violates our basic intuitions of how poverty
measures
> should behave. It cannot be right in concept that differentially higher
> mortality among the poor serves to reduce poverty. This paper begins the
> task of developing poverty measures that are not perversely mortality
> sensitive. A family of measures is proposed that is an intuitive
> modification of standard poverty measures to take into account the fact
that
> the rich live longer than the poor...."