Measuring Chronic Poverty: A Gravitational Approach

The paper contributes to the literature of lifetime/chronic poverty measurement by introducing a new mechanism to capture and quantify the e¤ect of chronic poverty on lifetime/intertemporal poverty. The key to the new approach is the conceptualization that a period of poverty generates a lasting but tapering impact on future poverty deprivations. Similarly a period of prosperity also generates an impact that mitigates future poverty su¤erings. This conceptualization leads naturally to a class of gravitational measures of lifetime poverty in the spirit of Newton’s law of universal gravitation. We characterize this general class as well as its special members. The proposed measures are illustrated with the US SIPP data. JEL Classi…cations: I32