pov {ineq}R Documentation

Poverty Measures

Description

computes the poverty of an (income) vector according to the specified poverty measure

Usage

pov(x,k,parameter=1,type=c("Watts", "Sen", "Foster")) 

Watts(x,k)
Sen(x,k)
Foster(x,k,parameter=1)

Arguments

x a vector containing at least non-negative elements
k a constant giving the absolute poverty boundary
parameter parameter of the poverty measure
type character string giving the measure used to compute poverty coefficient must be one of the strings in the default argument (the first character is sufficient). defaults to "Watts".

Details

pov is just a wrapper for the poverty measures of Watts, Sen and Foster (Foster / Greer / Thorbecke).

Foster gives for parameter 1 the head count ratio and for parameter 2 the poverty gap ratio.

Value

the value of the poverty measure

Author(s)

Achim Zeileis zeileis@ci.tuwien.ac.at

References

Buhong Zheng: Aggregate Poverty Measures, 1997, Journal of Economic Surveys Vol.11 No.2, 123-162.

J E Foster: On Economic Poverty: A Survey Of Aggregate Measures, 1984, Advances in Econometrics Vol. 3, 215-251.

See Also

ineq, conc

Examples

# generate vectors (of incomes)
x <- c(541, 1463, 2445, 3438, 4437, 5401, 6392, 8304, 11904, 22261)
y <- c(841, 2063, 2445, 3438, 4437, 5401, 6392, 8304, 11304, 21961)
# compute Watts index with poverty boundary 2000
pov(x, 2000)
pov(y, 2000)
# compute head count ratio with poverty boundary 2000
pov(x, 2000, parameter=1, type="Foster")
pov(y, 2000, parameter=1, type="Foster")