How to Decompose Sen-Shorrocks-Thon Poverty Index: A Practitioner’s Guide

Abstract

The Sen-Shorrocks-Thon index of poverty intensity is a useful measure of poverty intensity, but the link between the index and its decompositions is not necessarily transparent. This guide documents our experience using the index and is written to assist other policy analysts to compute and understand this index and its decomposition with simple mathematics, numerical examples and geometrical figures.