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Semi-Heuristic Poverty Measures Used by Economists: Justification Motivated by Fuzzy Techniques
Karen Villaverde, New Mexico State University - Main CampusFollow Nagwa Albehery, New Mexico State University - Main CampusFollow Tonghui Wang, New Mexico State University - Main CampusFollow Vladik Kreinovich, University of Texas at El PasoFollow
12-2011
Technical Report: UTEP-CS-11-61
To properly gauge the extent of poverty in a country or in a region, economists use semi-heuristic poverty measures such as the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) metric. These measures are used because it was empirically shown that they capture the commonsense meaning of the extent of poverty better than previously proposed measures. However, the fact that these measures are better then a few earlier proposed ones does not necessarily mean that these measures are the best possible; so, it is desirable to look for optimal poverty measures. In this paper, we first use fuzzy techniques to provide a commonsense interpretation of FGT poverty measures, and then show that under certain reasonable conditions, these measures are indeed optimal.
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Technical Report: UTEP-CS-11-61