Arndt, ChanningSimler, Kenneth R.2012-03-302012-03-302010Economic Development and Cultural Change00130079https://hdl.handle.net/10986/4695A fundamental premise of absolute poverty lines is that they represent the same level of utility through time and space. Disturbingly, a series of recent studies in middle- and low-income economies show that even carefully derived poverty lines rarely satisfy this premise. This article proposes an information-theoretic approach to estimating cost-of-basic-needs (CBN) poverty lines that are utility consistent. Applications to date illustrate that utility-consistent poverty measurements derived from the proposed approach and those derived from current CBN best practices often differ substantially, with the current approach tending to systematically overestimate (underestimate) poverty in urban (rural) zones.ENMeasurement and Analysis of Poverty I320Economic Development: Human ResourcesHuman DevelopmentIncome DistributionMigration O150Economic Development: Regional, Urban, and Rural AnalysesTransportation O180Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics: Regional MigrationRegional Labor MarketsPopulationNeighborhood Characteristics R230Journal ArticleWorld Bank