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Poverty Lines

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Abstract

The article provides welfare-economic definitions of poverty lines and critically assesses the main methods of setting poverty lines found in practice. These can be interpreted as ways of expanding the information set used in applied work to address some long-standing problems in measuring welfare. Objective methods draw on information from outside economics on the commodities needed for normative activity levels. Subjective methods extend the information base by drawing on selfreported perceptions of consumption adequacy, allowing estimation of an endogenous social subjective poverty line.

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Ravallion, M. (2018). Poverty Lines. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2541

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