Ethically Flexible Indices of Poverty

In the decades since the World War II, lot of attention has been paid by economists to the problem of development of the Third World countries and the associated problems of poverty. Even in the developed countries poverty remains one of the major issues of current economic and social policy. To understand the threat that the problem of poverty poses, it is necessary to know its dimensions and the process through which it seems to be aggravated. In this chapter and in the next chapter of this book we are interested in the quantification of poverty.