RECKONING INTER-GROUP POVERTY DIFFERENTIALS IN THE MEASUREMENT OF AGGREGATE POVERTY

It is plausible that the extent of measured aggregate poverty should depend upon the distribution of poverty across a population's subgroups. The aggregate measure of poverty would then lend itself to 'penal adjustment' to reflect the extent of inter-group disparity in the distribution of poverty. In the present paper, this approach to poverty measurement is examined by advancing a diagrammatic aid to analysis called the group poverty profile. The latter is a virtual transplantation, to the present context, of the notion of a deprivation profile that has been explored and analysed by Shorrocks (1996) in a different context.