Status, Poverty and Trade

Abstract

The conflict between the income based and nutrition based estimates of poverty is a widely debated issue in economic literature. This paper, using a two commodity framework, attempts to show that in presence of inequality, a status driven utility function can reconcile the conflict between the two measures of poverty. In addition, a simple general equilibrium model using such a utility function is constructed to analyse the implications of social inequality on relative prices and the emerging pattern of trade.Inequality, Nutrition good, Poverty, Status good, Trade, Utility