Measuring Poverty Using Both Income And Wealth

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the approaches to poverty based on income and wealth that have been proposed in the literature. Two types of approaches are considered: those that look at income and wealth separately when defining the poverty frontier, and those in which these two dimensions are integrated into a single index of welfare. The authors illustrate the implications of these approaches on the structure of poverty using data for two industrialized countries - for example, the United States and Spain. They find that the incidence of poverty in these two countries varies significantly depending on the poverty definition adopted.