Poverty Measurement in Human Development Foster 2008

Instructor: James Foster, Professor of Economics and International Affairs, George Washington University, and OPHI Research Associate

Class Objectives: This class covers the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) class of poverty measures and also reviews a number of properties and considerations pertaining to income-based poverty measurement.

Video

Part 1

[flashvideo title=Unidimensional Poverty image=wp-content/uploads/default_video.jpg file=wp-content/uploads/James_Foster_Lecture_1_Part_1_Titles-1.m4v /]

Part 2

[flashvideo title=Unidimensional Poverty image=wp-content/uploads/default_video.jpg file=wp-content/uploads/James_Foster_Lecture_1_Part_2-1.m4v /]

Reading List
Key readings:
Foster, J., J. Greer, and E. Thorbecke (1984): “A Class of Decomposable Poverty Measures,” Econometrica, 52, 761-766.
Foster , J. E. (1998): “Absolute Versus Relative Poverty,” The American Economic Review, 88, 335-341.
— (2006): “Poverty Indices,” in Poverty, Inequality and Development: Essays in Honor of Erik Thorbecke, ed. by A. de Janvry, and R. Kanbur. Economic Studies in Inequality, Social Exclusion and Well-Being. New York: Springer, 41-65.
Foster, J. E., and A. K. Sen (1997): “After a Quarter Century,” Substantial Appendix to A. K. Sen On Economic Inequality. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (especially the section on poverty)

Background readings:
Clark , S., R. Hemming, and D. Ulph (1981): “On Indices for the Measurement of Poverty,” The Economic Journal, 91, 515-526.
Sen , A. K. (1976): “Poverty: An Ordinal Approach to Measurement,” Econometrica, 44, 219-231.
Shorrocks , A. F. (1997) “Revisiting the Sen poverty index,” Econometrica, 63, 1225

Instructor: James Foster, Professor of Economics and International Affairs, George Washington University, and OPHI Research Associate

Class Objectives: This class reviews techniques of comparing poverty orderings and of conducting tests for robustness of choices such as poverty lines or weights in indices.

Video
Part 1

[flashvideo title=Dominance and Robustness image=wp-content/uploads/default_video.jpg file=wp-content/uploads/James_Foster_Lecture_2_Robustness_and_Dominance_Part_1.m4v /]

Part 2 Not Available

Reading List
Key readings:
Atkinson, A. (1970): ” On the Measurement of Inequality ,” Journal of Economic Theory , 2, 244-63.
Foster, J.E., and A. K. Sen (1997): “After a Quarter Century,” Substantial Appendix to A. K. SenOn Economic Inequality. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Foster, J.E., M. McGillivray and S. Seth (2007): “Rank Robustness of Multidimensional Well-being Measures” mimeo.
Foster, J.E., and A. Shorrocks (1988): “Poverty Orderings and Welfare Dominance,” Social Choice and Welfare, 5, 179-198.

Background readings:

Atkinson , A. B. (1987): “On the Measurement of Poverty,” Econometrica, 55, 749-764.
Bawa V.S. (1975) Optimal rules for ordering uncertain prospects . Journal of Financial Economics 2: 95–121.
Ravallion, M. (1994): Poverty Comparisons, Fundamentals of Pure and Applied Economics, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Shorrocks, A.F. and J.E. Foster (1987): “Transfer sensitive inequality measures”, Review of Economic Studies, 54, 485-497.
Shorrocks, A.F. (1983): “Ranking income distributions”, Economica , 50, 3-17.

Instructor: James Foster, Professor of Economics and International Affairs, George Washington University, and OPHI Research Associate

Class Objectives: This session introduces some economic approaches to analysing advances in human development, particularly health and education.

Video

Part 1
[flashvideo title=Human Development image=wp-content/uploads/default_video.jpg file=wp-content/uploads/James_Foster_Lecture_3_Human_Development_Part_1.m4v /]

Part 2
[flashvideo title=Human Development image=wp-content/uploads/default_video.jpg  file=wp-content/uploads/James_Foster_Lecture_3_Human_Development_Part_2.m4v /]

Reading List
Key readings:
Basu, K. and J.E. Foster (1998): “On measuring literacy”. The Economic Journal, 108, 1733-49.
Allison, R.A. and Foster, J.E. (2004): “Measuring health inequality using qualitative data”, Journal of Health Economics, 23, 3, 505-524.
Foster, J.E., L. Lopez-Calva, and M. Szekely (2005): “Measuring the Distribution of Human Development: Methodology and an Application to Mexico”. Journal of Human Development. 6, 5-29.
Hicks, D.A. (1997): “The inequality-adjusted Human Development Index: a constructive proposal”, World Development , 25, 1283–1298.

Background readings:
Anand, S. and A.K. Sen (1995): “Gender inequality in human development: theories and measurement”, Human Development Report Office Occasional Paper 19. United Nations Development Programme, New York, August.
Seth, Suman (2008): “Correlation Adjusted Multidimensional Development Indices,” mimeo

Instructor: James Foster, Professor of Economics and International Affairs, George Washington University, and OPHI Research Associate

Course Objectives: Overview of counting and multidimensional poverty measures.

Audio