Achievement and improvement in living standards

Kakwani (1993) suggested some postulates for an index of improvement in the level of living of a population. He also suggested a particular class of improvement indices. In this paper we characterize axiomatically the entire Kakwani class of indices. We also derive a sufficient condition to avoid a non-comparability problem pointed out by Kakwani. JEL classification: I31 Keywords: Living standard; Achievement; Improvement