Amartya Sen, "Poverty: An Ordinal Approach to Measurement", Econometrica, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Mar., 1976), pp. 219-231

The primary aim of this paper is to propose a new measure of poverty, which should avoid some of the shortcomings of the measures currently in use. An axiomatic approach is used to derive the measure. The conception of welfare in the axiom set is ordinal. The information requirement for the new measure is quite limited, permitting practical use.