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	Poverty Dominance Analysis	Lorenz Curve
Field	Economics	Sociology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1987	1905
Originator	Anthony Atkinson (1987); James Foster & Anthony Shorrocks (1988)	Max Otto Lorenz
Type	Robust distributional ordering	Graphical representation of distributional inequality
Seminal source	Atkinson, A. B. (1987). On the measurement of poverty. Econometrica, 55(4), 749–764.	Lorenz, M. O. (1905). Methods of measuring the concentration of wealth. Publications of the American Statistical Association, 9(70), 209–219.
Aliases	Stochastic Dominance Analysis, Poverty Orderings, TIP Curve Analysis, First- and Second-Order Poverty Dominance	Lorenz concentration curve, Lorenz diagram, cumulative share curve
Related	3	5
Summary	Poverty dominance analysis asks whether one distribution has unambiguously less poverty than another for a whole class of poverty measures and a whole range of poverty lines, rather than for a single index and a single line. Building on Anthony Atkinson's 1987 stochastic-dominance treatment of poverty and the Foster-Shorrocks 1988 poverty-orderings results, it compares cumulative distribution functions (poverty incidence curves) and their successive integrals (poverty deficit and severity curves). When the curve for one distribution lies everywhere below another, that distribution has less poverty for every measure in a corresponding class and every line in the range — a robust conclusion immune to the index-and-line arbitrariness that bedevils single-number comparisons.	The Lorenz curve is a graphical device that displays the full shape of inequality in a distribution by plotting the cumulative share of a quantity (such as income) held by the cumulative share of the population, ranked from poorest to richest. Introduced by Max Lorenz in 1905, it underlies the Gini coefficient and provides the basis for ranking distributions by inequality when one curve lies entirely above another.