Objective poverty measures alone are not sufficient to understand the complexity of poverty and that subjective measures can complement them in important ways, especially with regard to reaching the poorest and making their voice heard.
We estimate a family of price indexes known as Household Cost Indexes (HCI) using U.S. data. HCIs aim to measure the average inflation experiences of households as they purchase goods and services for consumption, and similar indexes are produced in the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
This paper examines CPI indexes for subsets of the target population defined by the bottom and top of the income distribution and compares results with the target population.
