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The publication of this book is in large part due to the role of Canada's International Development Research Center (IDRC) in encouraging policy-relevant research in the fields of poverty and equity. The book has in particular benefitted much from IDRC's support of two significant ventures, the Micro Impacts of Macro Economic and Adjustment Programs (MIMAP) and the Poverty and Economic Policy (PEP) international research network. We are most grateful to the IDRC for their continued and inspiring dedication, professionalism and vision in the field of development research. The Secrétariat d'appui institutionnel à la recherche économique en Afrique (SISERA), the World Bank Institute and the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) have also partially supported to the production of this book. The fundamental research was further financed by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and from the Fonds Québécois de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture (FQRSC) of the Province of Québec.

This book is mostly targeted to senior undergraduate and graduate students in economics as well as to researchers and analytical policy makers. More generally, it is intended for social scientists and statisticians. Some of its content can also be instructive to less specialized readers, such as those in the general public wishing to introduce themselves to the challenges posed and the insights generated by distributive analysis.

The book covers a relatively wide range of material. Part I deals with some of the conceptual, methodological and empirical issues and difficulties that arise in the assessment of well-being and poverty. Part II presents a number of measures on poverty, inequality, social welfare, and vertical and horizontal equity. Part III considers some of the methods that can establish whether a distribution of well-being or a policy "dominates" another in terms of some generally-defined ethical criteria. Part IV develops tools that can be used to understand and predict how targeting, price changes, growth and fiscal policy can affect poverty and equity. Part V introduces some of the statistical tech­niques that can help depict the distribution of living standards and help protect against the presence of sampling errors in making poverty and equity comparisons. Part V also introduces DAD and shows how that software can be used to apply the book's measurement and statistical techniques to micro data. Part VI contains a number of exercises (with illustrative datasets) that can be used to learn to implement some of the measurement and statistical techniques described in the book.

We certainly cannot pretend the book to be a comprehensive survey of the methods used to analyze poverty and equity. There is an obvious tendency for an author's exposition of a subject to be biased in favor of the work he knows best—and thus in favor of the work most closely related to his own work. This book is a clear example of this bias. One advantage of such a bias, however, is that it tends to unify the exposition. Such a unification, we have tried to enforce as much as we could throughout the various parts of the book. This helped present in a single text a unified treatment of distributive analysis from a conceptual, methodological, policy, statistical and practical point of view.

Most of the book's footnotes refer to applications programmed in DAD. These footnotes can thus guide the reader to where to go in DAD to test and implement many of the measurement and statistical tools exposed in the book. In the margins appear the exercise numbers which can be used to learn more about the book's tools. Most of these exercises involve the use of DAD. The solutions to the exercises can be found on DAD's official web page,

www.mimap.ecn.ulaval.ca.

The illustrative datasets used are briefly described at the end of the exercises. An index of the symbols used can be found starting on page 376. An author and a subject index are also provided at the end of the book.

To ease exposition within the main text, we endeavored to limit as much possible references to the literature, except when such references were clearly improving readability. Instead, each chapter is followed by a reference section in which the chapter's appropriate bibliographic references are mentioned and linked to each other.

This book and the accompanying software are certainly perfectible. I suppose it is the plight of all book writers to feel that their product is never satisfactorily finished. We hope to correct some of this version's shortcomings in future editions. For this, any comments on this first edition will be gratefully received.

I wish to thank my co-authors and former students, Sami Bibi, Philippe Grégoire, Vincent Jalbert, Paul Makdissi and Martin Tabi for their insights and dedication. I am also very grateful to my co-authors on distributive analysis papers — Russell Davidson, Damien Échevin, Carl Fortin, Peter Lambert, Magda Mercader, David Sahn, Steve Younger and Quentin Wodon — for their friendship and fruitful collaboration. Work at Université Laval was made productive and particularly enjoyable by the encouragement of my colleagues — among whom Bernard Decaluwé and Bernard Fortin feature prominently as former heads of CRÉFA — and more generally by the support of the Department of Economics and CIRPÉE (formerly CRÉFA). My thanks also extend to MIMAP and PEP co-workers, inter alia Touhami Abdelkhalek, Louis-Marie Asselin, Dorothée Boccanfuso, John Cockburn, Anyck Dauphin, Yazid Dissou, Samuel Kaboré, Jean Bosco Ki, Marie-Claude Martin, Damien Mededji, Abena Oduro, Luc Savard, Randy Spence, and to the teams of IDRC and AERC administrators and researchers with whom we have had the pleasure and privilege to work in the last decade. They provided much of the motivation and inspiration for writing this book. I am also grateful to my co-author, Abdelkrim Araar, for the trust and dedication he put into building DAD and this book's material over the last years, despite the uncertainty that initially clouded the project. I finally wish to thank Bill Carman of IDRC and Marilea Polk Fried of Springer-Kluwer for their efforts in bringing the publication of this book to full completion.

JEAN-YVES DUCLOS

Developing the DAD software, conducting fundamental research in distributive analysis and assisting researchers in developed countries have been my main activities for the last several years. The expertise that I have acquired in distributive analysis is the result of the continued support that I have received from Jean-Yves Duclos, who was also the director of my Ph.D. thesis. I am also grateful to all the researchers with whom I have worked for their collaboration and assistance.

ARAAR ABDELKRIM

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