Foster, Seth, Lokshin, and Sajaia's text provides educators, students, researchers, and policy makers with an introduction to the theory and practice of poverty and inequality measurement, as well as a practical guide to using the ADePT program--a free download from the World Bank's website--to analyze income or consumption distribution for any standard household dataset. Coverage includes an introduction to poverty measurement and related distributional analysis tools; the concepts involved in measuring income standards, inequality, and poverty; interpreting tables and graphs generated by the ADePT analysis program; and frontier technologies currently being implemented in the ADePT software. The final chapter contains basic information about installing and using ADePT, illustrated with b&w screen shots, sufficient for performing a simple analysis; more detailed instructions, video tutorials, sample datasets, projects, and reports are available online. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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'A Unified Approach to Measuring Poverty and Inequality: Theory and Practice' is an introduction to the theory and practice of measuring poverty and inequality, as well as a user's guide for analyzing income or consumption distribution for any standard household dataset using the World Bank's ADePT software. The approach taken here considers income standards as building blocks for basic measurement, then uses them to construct inequality and poverty measures. This unified approach provides advantages in interpreting and contrasting the measures and in understanding the way measures vary over time and space.Several recent initiatives have lowered the cost of accessing household datasets. The ADePT software enables users to analyze microdata from household surveys and other sources and generate print-ready, standardized tables and charts. It can also be used to simulate the impact of economic shocks, cash transfers and other policy instruments on poverty, and inequality. The software automates analysis, helps minimize human errors, and encourages development of new economic analysis methods. Of interest to teachers and students as well as to policy practitioners, 'A Unified Approach to Measuring Poverty and Inequality' will empower researchers to plumb greater depths in searching for regularity in larger and larger datasets. This book should help to enrich discussion and analysis relating to the World Bank's recent effort toward defining new targets and indicators for promoting work on eradicating poverty and enhancing shared prosperity.
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