  We study the empirical decomposition of poverty indicators. This property is
very important and convenient in the context of the fight against poverty.
Indeed, it makes it possible to put in place sectoral poverty reduction
policies on the basis of a relevant stratification laid down at the outset. The
simultaneous impacts of these policies, measured as reduction gains over the
population as a whole, is then obtained by aggregating those obtained at each
stratum by a relatively simple formula. It turns out that indicators as
important as those of Sen and Shorrocks do not verify this property contrary to
the elements of the class of Foster - Greer and Thorbecke. Given the data from
the 1996 Senegalese Survey of Households (ESAM), we show that the lack of
decomposability of these indicators on the income variable for several types of
population stratification is practically zero , of the order of one to two per
thousand. This makes it possible to use the decomposition of the Sen and
Shorrocks indicators without any untoward consequences. An explanatory model of
these results is presented for future research.
