More Relatively‐Poor People in a Less Absolutely‐Poor World
论文认为社会效应（如相对剥夺、羞耻感）要求重新评估全球贫困，提出用弱相对贫困线作为绝对贫困线的补充，发现1990年代以来发展中国家绝对贫困和弱相对贫困发生率下降，但相对贫困人口数量变化不大，2008年高于1981年。
Relative deprivation, shame, and social exclusion can matter to the welfare of people everywhere. The paper argues that such social effects on welfare call for a reconsideration of how we assess global poverty. We argue for using a weakly‐relative measure as the upper‐bound complement to the lower‐bound provided by a standard absolute measure. New estimates of poverty are presented. The absolute line is $1.25 a day at 2005 prices, while the relative line rises with the mean, at a gradient of 1:2 above $1.25 a day, consistently with national poverty lines. We find that the incidence of both absolute and weakly‐relative poverty in the developing world has been falling since the 1990s, but more slowly for the relative measure. While the number of absolutely poor has fallen, the number of relatively poor has changed little since the 1990s, and is higher in 2008 than 1981.