Re: Postrel on liberalization

[Alan G Isaac <aisaac@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 25 Aug 2002 14:02:05 -0400 "Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> As for a resonable reading of the abstract, please show us
> some evidence that your reading of the abstract is more correct.

Henry,   As I already indicated, not even a mediocre
economist would overlook such an obvious point, and
Sala-i-Martin is no mediocrity.  But since your suspicions
run so deep, you can also turn to the papers.  From the
"Rise" paper p.17:

    We use the conventional definitions of absolute poverty:
    less than one dollar per day. The original definition is due
    to Ravallion et. al (1991). These researchers used
    ?perceptions of poverty? in the poorest countries to place
    the poverty line at $31 per month. Later , the definition
    was changed to $30.42, and it then was rounded off to $1 per
    day. The $1/day line was later adopted by the World Bank as
    the ?official? definition of?absolute poverty?. For some
    reason, another poverty line mysteriously appeared in the
    literature that doubled the original figure to two dollars
    per day. The United Nations some times uses four dollars per
    day. Of course, if one is allowed to raise the poverty line
    arbitrarily, then one is bound to find that all persons in
    the world are poor. In this paper we will stick with the
    original definition of poverty and we will also analyze the
    $2/day line.
    It should be noted that all these definitions are expressed
    in 1985 values. Since the Summers and Heston data are
    reported in 1996 dollars, the annual incomes that define
    $1/day and $2/day poverty in our data set are $532 and $1064
    respectively.


Cheers,
Alan