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Intertemporal Poverty Measurement: Tradeoffs and Policy Options Catherine Porter, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford Natalie N. Quinn, Balliol College, University of Oxford Download the Paper (PDF format) - August 1, 2008 Tell a colleague about it. Printing Tips: Select 'print as image' in the Acrobat print dialog if you have trouble printing. ABSTRACT: This paper makes three contributions to the literature on intertemporal poverty measurement, in particular the aggregation of a measure of wellbeing over time and across people. Firstly we conduct an exhaustive analysis of properties of intertemporal poverty measures, identifying relationships between the functional form and properties of ITPMs and identifying the tradeoffs and compatibilities that exist between the properties. We link this to the normative choices a poverty analyst must make when measuring intertemporal poverty. We also determine a ‘recipe’ which may be used to construct poverty measures with properties desired by the poverty analyst. Second, we apply the recipe to construct a new family of intertemporal poverty measures with the desired property of increasing compensation, a property that has thus far not been discussed in the literature. Third, we calculate measures from the new family and compare them to other measures recently proposed in the literature, to evaluate poverty in rural Ethiopia in the period 1994 - 2004. SUGGESTED CITATION: Catherine Porter and Natalie N. Quinn, "Intertemporal Poverty Measurement: Tradeoffs and Policy Options" (August 1, 2008). The Centre for the Study of African Economies Working Paper Series. Working Paper 301. http://www.bepress.com/csae/paper301