DAD is a software designed to facilitate the analysis and the comparisons of social welfare, inequality, poverty and equity across distributions of living standards. Its features include the estimation of a large number of indices and curves that are useful for distributive comparisons as well as the provision of asymptotic standard errors to enable statistical inference. The features also include basic descriptive statistics and provide simple non-parametric estimations of density functions and regressions.

The main facilities of DAD are the:

• Estimation of indices of Poverty (Watts, CHU, FGT, S-Gini, Sen): normalised and un-normalised (or absolute and relative poverty indices), with absolute and relative poverty line.
• Social Welfare (Atkinson, S-Gini, Atkinson-Gini).
• Inequality (S-Gini, Atkison, Entropy, Atkinson-Gini, and others).
• Redistribution, progressivity, vertical equity, reranking and horizontal inequity.
• Decomposition of Poverty across population subgroups.
• Inequality across population subgroups or by "factor components" (e.g., by type of consumption expenditures or source of income)
• Progressivity and equity across different taxes and/or tranfers and subsidies.
• Checks for the robustness of distributive comparisons.
• Estimation of stochastic dominance curves of the primal and dual types, for poverty, social welfare, inequality and equity dominance.
• Robustness of decompositions into population subgroups and factor components.
• Estimation of popular "dual" curves: ordinary and generalised Lorenz curves, Cumulative Poverty Gap curves, quantile curves, normalised quantile curves, curves of quantiles of poverty gaps, concentration curves.
• Estimation of popular "primal" curves: cumulative distribution functions, poverty deficit curves, poverty depth curves, etc.
• Estimation of differences in curves and indices.
• Estimation of "critical" poverty lines for absolute and relative poverty comparisons.
• Estimation of crossing points for dual curve Provision of asymptotic standard deviations on all estimates of indices, points on curves, critical poverty lines, crossing points, etc., allowing for dependence or independence in the samples being compared. These standard deviations are currently computed under the assumption of identically and independently distributed sample observations, but the computations take into account the randomness of the sampling weights when such weights are provided by the user.
• Allowance for sampling errors in the poverty lines specified to compute absolute and relative poverty indices.

DAD’s environment is user-friendly and uses menus to select the variables and options needed for all applications. The software can load simultaneously two data bases, can carry out applications with only one data base or two, and can allow for dependence or independence of data bases and vectors of living standards in computing standard errors on differences in indices and curves.

The data bases can be built with the software or can be loaded from a hard disk or a floppy or CD-ROM driver. The data bases can be edited, new observations can be added, and new vectors of data can be generated using arithmetical or logical operators.