ABSTRACT
The most important reason for measuring poverty is probably not the need for a single number for some place and date, but rather to make a poverty comparison. This is an assessment of which of two situations has more poverty. Poverty comparisons may be either ordinal or cardinal. Examples of questions which only call for ordinal poverty comparisons are: Has poverty increased over time? Is it higher in one place than another? Is there more poverty with some policy change? Cardinal poverty comparisons, on the other hand, call for a quantification of how much difference there is in the amount of poverty. For some of the reasons that we make poverty comparisons, only an ordinal assessment is essential; the choice between two policies is an example. However, in other circumstances, such as in assessing how much impact on poverty is to be expected from a specific policy option, a cardinal poverty comparison is called for.
