Some alternatives to the poverty gap for international comparisons

N.T. Longford and C. Nicodemo

Abstract

The mean poverty gap, defined as the country's average shortfall of the (equivalised) household income with respect to a set threshold, is generally regarded as an important measure of monetary poverty. We show that it is not suitable for international comparisons and propose two related alternatives, one based on the log-transformation of income. The methods are applied to the cross-sectional component of the EU-SILC database from 2007.

In Ukrainian Journal of Demography and Social Economics.

April 2013