Semi-heuristic poverty measures used by economists: Justification motivated by fuzzy techniques

To properly gauge the extent of poverty in a country or in a region, economists use semi-heuristic poverty measures such as the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) metric. These measures are used because it was empirically shown that they capture the commonsense meaning of the extent of poverty better than previously proposed measures. However, without a theoretical justification, we cannot guarantee that these semi-heuristic measures will work in other situations as well. So, it is desirable to look for poverty measures which can be theoretically justified. In this paper, we first use fuzzy techniques to provide a commonsense interpretation of FGT poverty measures, and then show that how this informal interpretation can be transformed into a formal justification of the FGT property measures - from certain reasonable assumptions.