Welfare economics, social choice theory, distributional analysis, and poverty assessments are all important ingredients in pondering problems in concepts and measurement. This book is a collection of papers, written over the last twenty years or so, that deal with issues of social choice, rights, poverty, and inequality.

Contents:
Table of Figures;
Abbreviations;
Introduction:
1. Basic needs, positive freedom, and the possibility of rights-respecting social choice --
2. The impossibility of a non-discriminating liberal : a liberty paradox without the pareto principle --
3. The liberal paradox with fuzzy preferences --
4. Preference motivations and libertarian dilemmas --
5. A paretian liberal dilemma without collective rationality --
6. On trading personal liberty --
7. On a simple transfer-sensitive index of inequality --
8. An elementary interpretation of the Gini inequality index --
9. A re-scaled version of the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty indices based on all association with the minkowski distance function --
10. Unravelling a conceptual muddle : India's poverty statistics in the light of basic demand theory --
11. On measuring deprivation adjusted for group disparities / Manabi Majumdar --
12. Aspects of global deprivation and disparity : a child's guide to some simple-minded arithmetic --
13. Poverty measures and anti-poverty policy with an egalitarian constraint --
14. Some simple analytics of poverty redress through direct income transfers and wage employment programmes : a review and commentary --
15. Measuring literacy : some extensions of the Basu-Foster framework --
16. A model of 'triadic' power relations in the inter-linkage of agrarian markets --
17. Poverty minimization in the light of 'life-boat ethics' --
18. Poverty measurement and theories of beneficence --
19. Counting the poor : an elementary difficulty in the measurement of poverty --
20. Fractions versus whole numbers : on headcount comparisons of poverty across variable populations --
Bibliography.