Atkinson and Bourguignon's dominance criteria: Extended and applied to themeasurement of poverty in France

We demonstrate that the criteria put forward by Atkinson and Bourguignon (1 987) can be satisfactorily applied to the analysis of poverty even when the demographic composition of society and the definition of poverty change ov er time. We show that they provide both sufficient and necessary conditions for any robust conclusions concerning the changes in welfare and poverty. We apply these criteria to a set of data tracking annual income distributio n movements in France from 1977 to 1994. The Atkinson and Bourguignon crite ria posit that recent changes in poverty are a function of macroeconomic fl uctuations in activity.