A recent trend in the study of poverty is to consider a relative poverty line, one that is responsive to the nature of the income distribution. We develop an axiomatic approach to the determination of an amalgam poverty line. Given a reference income (e.g. the mean or the median), the amalgam poverty line becomes a weighted average of the absolute poverty line and the reference income, where the weights depend on the policy maker's preferences for aggregating the two components. The paper ends with an empirical illustration comparing rural and urban and areas in the People's Republic of China and India.

Social inequality is traditionally measured by the Gini-index (g). The g-index takes values from 0 to 1 where g = 0 represents complete equality and g = 1 represents complete inequality. Most of the estimates of the income or wealth data indicate the g value to be widely dispersed across the countries of the world: g values typically range from 0.30 to 0.65 at a particular time (year). We estimated similarly the Gini-index for the citations earned by the yearly publications of various academic institutions and the science journals. The ISI web of science data suggests remarkably strong inequality and universality (g = 0.70 ± 0.07) across all the universities and institutions of the world, while for the journals we find g = 0.65 ± 0.15 for any typical year. We define a new inequality measure, namely the k-index, saying that the cumulative income or citations of (1 − k) fraction of people or papers exceed those earned by the fraction (k) of the people or publications respectively. We find, while the k-index value for income ranges from 0.60 to 0.75 for income distributions across the world, it has a value around 0.75 ± 0.05 for different universities and institutions across the world and around 0.77 ± 0.10 for the science journals. Apart from above indices, we also analyze the same institution and journal citation data by measuring Pietra index and median index.

This paper identifies a family of absolute consistent inequality indices using a weakly decomposable postulate suggested by Ebert. Because one member employs an Atkinson type aggregation we refer to it as the Atkinson index of consistent inequality. A second member of this family parallels the Kolm index of inequality. Two innovative features of these indices are that no specific structure is imposed on the form of the index at the outset and no transformation of any existing index is considered to ensure consistency. Each of them regards an achievement distribution as equally unequal as the corresponding shortfall distribution. We apply these indices to study inequality in grip strength among 50+ year-old Europeans. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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An indicator of pro‐poorness of a growth profile associated with a distribution of income is a measure of the extent to which growth is biased towards the poor. This paper proposes a general approach to pro‐poorness, called the progressive sequential averaging principle (PSA), relaxing the requirement of rank preservation due to growth. An endogenous benchmark for evaluating the growth of poor comes out naturally from this principle. A dominance relation on the basis of the above approach for a class of growth profiles is introduced through a simple device, called the PSA curve and its properties are examined in relation to the standard dominances in terms of the generalized Lorenz curve and the inverse generalized Lorenz curve. The paper concludes with an application to evaluate growth profiles experienced by the United States between 2001–07 and 2007–13.

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Typescript prepared by Sophie Richmond for UNU-WIDER. UNU-WIDER gratefully acknowledges the financial contributions to the research programme from the governments of Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) was established by the United Nations University (UNU) as its first research and training centre and started work in Helsinki, Finland in 1985. The Institute undertakes applied research and policy analysis on structural changes affecting the developing and transitional economies, provides a forum for the advocacy of policies leading to robust, equitable and environmentally sustainable growth, and promotes capacity strengthening and training in the field of economic and social policy-making. Work is carried out by staff researchers and visiting scholars in Helsinki and through networks of collaborating scholars and institutions around the world.

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