Vulnerability to poverty: an empirical comparison of alternative measures

Abstract

This article compares empirically the several measures of individual vulnerability to poverty proposed in the literature, in order to understand which is the best signal of poverty that can be used for policy purposes. To this aim, the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, the Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients are used as precision criteria. The results show that two groups of indexes can be identified, high and low performers, and, among the former, that proposed by Dutta et al. ( 2011 Dutta, I . 2011. Foster, J. and Mishra, A., On measuring vulnerability to poverty, Social Choice and Welfare, 37, 743–61 [Google Scholar] ) is the most precise.