Poverty Measures in a Fuzzy Logic Framework

In the income (or consumption) poverty framework, a relevant open problem is connected with the distinction between poor and non-poor. This is usually done by considering a pre-specified income threshold called poverty line. If the income of an observation unit is lower (higher) than the poverty line, then such an observation unit is poor (non-poor or rich). Unfortunately, this procedure may often lead to questionable results because the concept of poverty is vague. In this connection, a promising line of research is the measurement of poverty according to a fuzzy logic approach. In this work, following such an approach, some new poverty measures based on the Gini and Bonferroni inequality indices are proposed.