ABSTRACT
Apart from the poverty status and its extent in any particular year, as quantified by the shortfall and summarised by a poverty index, the changes from one year to the next are also of interest. We refer to them as transitions, and the ‘catchy’ term associated with them is poverty dynamics (e.g., Duncan et al., 1993, Stewart and Swaffield, 1999, and Jenkins, 2000). A household that is classified as poor in one year and as not poor in the next is regarded as a success, and a household with a change in the other direction as a failure. The balance of successes and failures, that is, of exits from and entries to poverty, is an overall measure of the change. The rate (percentage) of transitions in either direction is a measure of the mobility of households between the two poverty states.
