Decompositions for the Kakwani poverty index

Abstract

Since Sen’s seminal article in 1976, it is very known that every poverty measure should be sensitive to the three components of poverty: incidence, intensity and inequality. The paper concentrates on the poverty measure proposed by Kakwani. If the Kakwani index is normalized, an ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator is obtained. The dual decomposition of the OWA operator into the self-dual core and anti-self-dual remainder allows us to propose a decomposition for this poverty index. Moreover, the inequality term obtained will measure the income inequality and gap inequality of the poor equally.