Poverty Dominance Analysis

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.