| |
What can we say about the potential impact of redistributive taxation on poverty? About how poverty in a society is distributed across well-defined population subgroups? About the nexus between poverty and child labour? About the patterns and magnitudes of ‘horizontal’, or group-related, inequalities? About how wealth in a society is distributed? About crucial aspects of the age- and gender-composition of a population? These are questions of substantive descriptive and analytical significance in assessing a society’s process of development.
Our ability to obtain meaningful answers to these questions is frequently predicated on our ability to measure the categories of poverty, inequality and population more or less satisfactorily. This, in turn, is assisted by self-conscious engagement with the role of measurement in social explanation, and the philosophical bases of measurement-related judgments. What is called for, then, is an appreciation of the demands of both conceptual clarity and empirical relevance in addressing these questions.
This combination of the formal elements of measurement and the substantive elements of development is a key feature of this book, which should be of interest to both development scholars and interested laypersons.
ISBN - 9780198067948
|
| |
|