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This section presents the topics and organizers of individual sessions at the 29th General Conference of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth from August 20 to 26, 2006 in Joensuu, Finland. The Luxembourg Wealth Study is developing international standards for comparisons of micro data that are compatible with national accounts data. The session will include papers concerning measurement of wealth from both a micro and a macro point of view, methodological issues concerning micro and macro estimates, the relationship between micro and macro estimates as well as comparative studies on portfolio composition and the distribution of wealth. Stephen Jenkins and Holly Sutherland will seek papers concerned with innovative approaches to addressing the imperfections of survey data, using improvements to survey instruments and addressing the issues after data collection. David Caplan and Tim Smeeding will discuss the state of the art in the measurement of government output and productivity following these developments and discuss how the views of producers of economic statistics and the needs of policy makers can be reconciled. Miles Corak will highlight developments in the measurement of child poverty, offer comparisons in levels and changes of child poverty rates across rich and developing countries, and relate poverty and low income to the well being of children as well as their capacity to become successful adults.

This article presents an overview of the agenda of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth's Twenty-Ninth General Conference in Joensuu, Finland, August 20-26, 2006. The session will include papers concerning measurement of wealth from both a micro and a macro point of view, methodological issues concerning micro and macro estimates, the relationship between micro and macro estimates as well as comparative studies on portfolio composition and the distribution of wealth. By 2006, member states of the European Union will be required to measure many parts of government output in volume terms directly. This session will discuss the state of the art in the measurement of government output and productivity following these developments and discuss how the views of producers of economic statistics and the needs of policy makers can be reconciled. Poverty and low income among children is a policy concern of increasing resonance in many rich and developing countries. The objective of this session is to highlight new developments in the measurement of child poverty, offer comparisons in levels and changes of child poverty rates across rich and developing countries, and relate poverty and low income to the well being of children as well as their capacity to become successful adults.

At the core of poverty eradication is the need to eliminate that poverty that is persistent over time (chronic poverty). Unfortunately, traditional approaches to identifying chronic poverty require longitudinal data that is rarely available. In its absence, this paper proposes an alternative approach that only requires 1 year of cross‐sectional data on monetary and non‐monetary poverty. It puts forth two conjectures and contends that the combined profile of a household as both income poor and multidimensionally poor can be used as a proxy of that household being chronically income poor. To explore the viability of this approach, we use a probit model and longitudinal data for three Latin American countries to estimate households' probabilities of remaining in income poverty based on their past income and multidimensional poverty statuses. We find empirical support for the approach that is significant, consistent across countries, and robust to various controls and periods of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the pro‐poor bias of trade policy in India by estimating the household welfare effects of removing the current protection structure. The elimination of a pro‐poor trade policy is expected to have a negative differential welfare effect at the low end of the distribution. The paper first constructs trade restrictiveness indexes for household consumption items and industries using both tariffs and non‐tariff barriers. The results indicate that Indian trade policy is regressive through the expenditure channel as it disproportionately raises the cost of consumption for poorer households, while it is progressive through the earnings channel. Based on the net welfare effects, the elimination of the current trade protection structure is estimated to reduce inequality. These results indicate that a trade policy that is progressive through the earnings channel may induce a price effect that is regressive through the expenditure channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While we have extensive information on the trends in income poverty, little is known about the trends in multidimensional poverty. The paper tries to fill this gap by assessing the changes in multidimensional poverty in 54 countries since 2000. The analysis relies on two individual‐based indices, the G‐CSPI and the G‐M0, which combine three dimensions: education, health, and employment, derived through the constitutional approach. The G‐CSPI is a distribution‐sensitive index, while the G‐M0 allows decomposition by dimension. The results reveal that more than 80 percent of the countries have reduced multidimensional poverty. However, progress was very limited in sub‐Saharan Africa. Different decomposition analyses indicate that poverty alleviation was mainly driven by a reduction in the incidence of poverty and a decline in health deprivations. A comparison with changes in income poverty suggests that the correlation is not strong and that multidimensional poverty has decreased significantly less. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we perform estimates of vulnerability to multidimensional poverty for 17 Latin American countries at three points of time: 2005/2006, 2012, and 2017. We use a Multidimensional Bayesian Network Classifier model to estimate the conditional probability of being multidimensionally poor and then we use these probabilities and the standard downside semi‐deviation as the risk parameter to identify the vulnerable households. Despite significant reductions over the study period, in 2017 approximately 150 million people—excluding Guatemala, Nicaragua and Venezuela for which we do not have recent data—remained vulnerable to multidimensional poverty. We also observe that vulnerability to poverty is reduced at a much slower rate than poverty itself, revealing that achievements in SDG1 can be quite fragile. We perform a decomposition and find that as poverty decreases, risk‐induced vulnerability becomes relatively more important than poverty‐induced vulnerability. However, the poor‐vulnerable still constitute the core vulnerability group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel method to analyze multidimensional poverty by using a large set of feasible weights to summarize the information about the poor, which enables remaining agnostic about the relative importance given to different poverty dimensions. This method allows for the calculation of the individual probability of being poor in a multidimensional perspective. The distribution of individual probabilities can then be combined with Generalized Lorenz dominance techniques to derive unanimous consent for a wide class of social welfare functions with a minimum load of value judgments. The innovations proposed here allow to move from a dual definition of poverty, where poor and non‐poor individuals are classified in a mutually exclusive context, to a continuous measure of deprivation capturing both the extensive and intensive margin of multidimensional poverty. The empirical application of the method consists of measuring multidimensional poverty in ten selected countries using four waves of EU‐SILC data (2008–2014). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including poverty, economic development, and behavioral economics.

This paper studies the pro‐poor bias of trade policy in India by estimating the household welfare effects of removing the current protection structure. The elimination of a pro‐poor trade policy is expected to have a negative differential welfare effect at the low end of the distribution. The paper first constructs trade restrictiveness indexes for household consumption items and industries using both tariffs and non‐tariff barriers. The results indicate that Indian trade policy is regressive through the expenditure channel as it disproportionately raises the cost of consumption for poorer households, while it is progressive through the earnings channel. Based on the net welfare effects, the elimination of the current trade protection structure is estimated to reduce inequality. These results indicate that a trade policy that is progressive through the earnings channel may induce a price effect that is regressive through the expenditure channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policies aimed at redistributing to the most vulnerable individuals must consider inequality within households as much as between households. In that spirit, many cash transfers are targeted at women rather than men. Tax legislations can also contain specific gender provisions that treat men and women differently. Whether these policies operate some intrahousehold redistribution, or are defeated by the household agency problem, is an open question. This paper provides new insights by adapting models of intrahousehold allocation to account for women's and men's net‐of‐tax earnings and targeted benefits as determinants of the household resource sharing function. We suggest applications using household expenditure data for Argentina and South Africa. Net‐of‐tax earnings and benefits commanded by women are often positively related to their and their children's resources. We provide counterfactual simulations to illustrate how women's financial power – and its sources – may modify their consumption share and thus their individual poverty status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including inequality, poverty and heterogeneity in Germany.

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss various articles within the issue on topics including the comparability of gross domestic product (GDP) estimates in Sub-Saharan Africa, the rise in asset ownership in Africa and the body mass index of adults in Southern Africa.

The global Multidimensional Poverty Index, published annually since 2010, captures acute multidimensional poverty in the developing world. In 2018, five of its ten indicators were revised with the purpose of aligning the index to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) insofar as current data permit. This paper provides comprehensive analyses of the consequences of this revision from three perspectives. First, we thoroughly discuss new empirical insights for 105 countries in the developing world based on a data set including 8.78 million individual observations. Second, we analyze the robustness of country orderings to changes in key parameters, including the poverty cutoff and dimensional weights. Third, we compare the revised and the original specifications by implementing both on the same 105 national data sets. The country orderings in the revised specification are found to be robust to a range of plausible parametric alternatives. Largely, these country orderings are at least as robust as the original one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small area estimation is an important tool to produce estimates of poverty for regions with low or zero sample sizes. Estimates are typically obtained by combining a consumption survey reporting on poverty and a census providing the spatial disaggregation. This paper discusses an updating method that produces up‐to‐date small area estimates when only a dated census and a more recent survey are available and predictors are subject to drift over time, a situation commonly encountered in practice. Instead of using survey variables to explain consumption in the survey, the updating approach uses only variables constructed from the census. The proposed estimator has fewer data requirements and weaker assumptions than common small area estimators. Applications to simulated data and to poverty estimation in Brazil show an overall good performance, but also imply the importance of examining practical challenges in real‐world applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incomes in surveys suffer from various measurement problems, most notably in the tails of their distributions. We study the prevalence of negative and zero incomes, and their implications for inequality and poverty measurement relying on 57 harmonized data sets from the Luxembourg Income Study and Economic Research Forum databases, covering 12 Mediterranean countries over the period 1995–2016. This paper explains the composition and sources of negative and zero incomes, and assesses the distributional impacts of alternative correction methods on poverty and inequality measures. It finds that the main source of negative disposable incomes is negative self‐employment income, and that high tax, social security withholding, and high self‐paid social security contributions account for negative incomes in some countries. Using detailed information on expenditure, we conclude that households with negative incomes are typically as well off as, or even better off than, other households in terms of material well‐being. On the contrary, zero‐income households are found to be materially deprived. Adjusting poverty and inequality measures for these findings can alter these measures significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Had poverty been halved between 1990 and 2015? In the present paper, we show how well‐known stochastic dominance tools can be used to check the robustness of claims regarding monetary poverty variations and then, using data from PovcalNet, provide a new picture of achievements with respect to poverty alleviation during the Millennium Development Goals' era. Using a sample of 90 developing countries, we notably observe that of the 58 countries whose pace of poverty reduction was consistent with a 50 percent decrease in the headcount index over a 25‐year period, 51 countries showed distribution changes that were in line with a more general conclusion that poverty would have been halved, whatever the poverty index we use, over the same period. Our results at the global level for the period 2002–2012 also show that the same conclusion robustly holds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on methodological and empirical issues in analyzing regional poverty and inequality trends in China. It provides a time profile of China's regional inequality, outlines the latest development in inequality decomposition techniques, introduces six papers in this special issue of the Review, and finally offers suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greece is the country hit hardest by the crisis and subsequent fiscal consolidation strategies, suffering a cumulative output loss of about 30 percent since 2008. The present paper presents evidence that along with declining average living standards, consumption inequality has seriously grown, fueled primarily by a disproportionate drop in the consumption levels of what can be considered the middle class. Although poverty has not significantly risen in relative terms, it climbs to around 45 percent once the poverty threshold is anchored to pre‐crisis levels. Furthermore, significant indirect tax hikes have further increased inequality in consumption expenditure. The paper also shows that several reforms launched in the name of reducing labor costs, broadening the tax base or rationalizing the targeting of social benefits have had detrimental effects on one of the most vulnerable population groups, namely families with children, thus implying that the social consequences of the crisis will be long‐lasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Asia's success at reducing poverty does not imply that the topic has become passé. Poverty rates are by now low, but this is because poverty lines are low as well. And the assessment of living standards and their dynamics are blurred by measurement and interpretation challenges. This paper relies mostly on South Asian examples to highlight four tensions: poorer versus richer households, rural versus urban locations, monetary versus non‐monetary dimensions of wellbeing, and household characteristics versus context. The discussion is conducted against the backdrop of the two analytical approaches with South Asian roots that have shaped the debate for decades. This review leads to three main recommendations: household survey data has to be exploited in a more thorough manner, data that is increasingly available from other sources needs to be incorporated more systematically in the analysis, and the multiple dimensions of wellbeing should be better integrated in a common framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Asia's success at reducing poverty does not imply that the topic has become passé. Poverty rates are by now low, but this is because poverty lines are low as well. And the assessment of living standards and their dynamics are blurred by measurement and interpretation challenges. This paper relies mostly on South Asian examples to highlight four tensions: poorer versus richer households, rural versus urban locations, monetary versus non‐monetary dimensions of wellbeing, and household characteristics versus context. The discussion is conducted against the backdrop of the two analytical approaches with South Asian roots that have shaped the debate for decades. This review leads to three main recommendations: household survey data has to be exploited in a more thorough manner, data that is increasingly available from other sources needs to be incorporated more systematically in the analysis, and the multiple dimensions of wellbeing should be better integrated in a common framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distribution of income in Russia changed significantly over the past 25 years. This paper examines the factors that have been driving the fall in inequality and poverty over two recent decades in the Russian Federation. Changes in earnings from public and private sectors and pensions have been the main sources of changes in the income distribution between 1994 and 2015. Falling inequality and poverty were the result of a decrease in the dispersion of private sector earnings and an increase in the levels of pensions and public sector earnings. Neither the evolution of socio‐demographic characteristics nor the level or structure of employment alone had big impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relation between economic growth and poverty, and develops the methodology to measure separately the impact of changes in average income and income inequality on poverty The paper also provides a link between the growth rates in various sectors of the economy and the total poverty. The methodology proposed is applied to the data taken from the Côte d'Ivoire Living Standards Survey conducted in 1985. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the impact of Tunisia's tax and transfer system on inequality and poverty and assesses the benefits from public spending on education and health. Results show that Tunisia's redistributive fiscal policy reduces inequality and extreme poverty significantly. However, based on the national poverty line, the headcount ratio increases, implying that a large number of the poor people pay more in taxes than they receive in cash transfers and subsidies. This is due to a relatively high burden of personal income taxes and social security contributions for low‐income households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new type of growth rate, called the “poverty equivalent growth rate” (PEGR), which takes into account both the growth rate in mean income and how the benefits of growth are distributed between the poor and the non-poor. The proposed measure satisfies a basic requirement that the proportional reduction in poverty is a monotonically increasing function of the PEGR. Thus, maximizing the PEGR implies a maximum reduction in poverty. The paper demonstrates that the magnitude of PEGR determines the pattern of growth: whether growth is pro-poor in relative or absolute sense or is “poverty reducing” pro-poor. The pattern of growth has been analyzed for Brazil using the National Household Survey (PNAD) covering the period 1995–2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new Multidimensional Poverty Index for Latin America. The index combines monetary and non‐monetary indicators, updates deprivation cut‐offs for certain traditional unsatisfied basic needs indicators and includes some new indicators, aiming to maximize regional comparability within the data constraints. The index is estimated for 17 countries of the region at two points in time—one around 2005 and the other around 2012. Overall, we estimate about 28 percent of people are multidimensionally poor in 2012 in the region. We find statistically significant reductions of poverty in most countries, both in terms of incidence and intensity over the period under analysis. However, important disparities between rural and urban areas remain. Statistical scrutiny of the index suggests that it captures the state of poverty relatively well while maintaining a certain parsimony and being highly robust to changes in weights, indicators, and poverty cut‐off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing should always be included in the construction of the welfare aggregate for welfare analysis. However, assigning a value to the flow of services from dwellings is problematic. Many households own the dwelling in which they live, making this value unobserved; others receive free housing or face prices lower than those at the market. Over the last decades, several estimation techniques have been proposed and implemented by practitioners to overcome this issue. This paper provides a review of methods commonly used to impute rent and discusses the relative advantages and disadvantages of each. We find no consensus on which imputation method is the most appropriate for welfare analysis, as well as a lack of evidence regarding the distributional impact of including rents in the welfare aggregate, particularly in developing countries. Moreover, practices for imputing rents vary across countries, calling for the future development of a unified framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using microdata from Household Budget Surveys of the Member States of the European Community, this paper examines the sensitivity of poverty statistics with respect tot eh choice of the equivalence scale. The results show that the ranking of the countries with respect to the overall poverty incidence is hardly affected when different equivalence scales are used. However, the composition of the poor population shows considerable changes when e.g. subjective equivalence scales are used instead of the OECD equivalence scale. The poverty incidence among specific household groups, such as single elderly and households with children, is particularly sensitive to the choice of the equivalence scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the measurement of social welfare, poverty, and inequality, taking into account features that have been found to be important welfare determinants in behavioral economics. Most notably, we incorporate reference-dependence, loss aversion, and diminishing sensitivity-aspects emphasized in Prospect Theory-to social welfare measurement. We suggest a new notion of equivalent income, the income level with which the individual would be as well off, evaluated using a standard concave utility function, as he actually is, evaluated with a reference-dependent utility function. We examine the differences between standard poverty and inequality measures based on observed income and measures that are calculated based on equivalent income. These differences are illustrated using household-level panel data from Russia and Vietnam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely recognized that poverty is a multidimensional phenomenon involving not only income, but also other aspects such as education or health. In this multidimensional setting, analyzing the dependence between dimensions becomes an important issue, since a high degree of dependence could exacerbate poverty. In this paper, we propose measuring the multivariate dependence between the dimensions of poverty in Europe using copula‐based methods. This approach focuses on the positions of individuals across dimensions, allowing for other types of dependence beyond linear correlation. In particular, we analyze how orthant dependence between the dimensions of the AROPE rate has evolved in the EU‐28 countries between 2008 and 2014 by applying non‐parametric estimates of multivariate copula‐based generalisations of Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. We find a general increase in the dependence between dimensions, regardless of the coefficient used. Moreover, countries with higher AROPE rates also tend to experiment more dependence between its dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The African continent has grown by more than 4 percent yearly on average during the past decade. However, the link between this remarkable growth rate and poverty reduction is neither obvious nor simple. This paper focuses on the elasticity of poverty with respect to GDP growth at the sectoral level and takes into account the fact that economic growth may affect poverty directly as well as indirectly through sectoral labor share intensity. It develops a methodology that sheds light on the contribution of sectoral growth to poverty reduction country-by-country in Africa, guiding policy recommendations. As the composition of growth matters at least as much as its overall intensity, it is key to identify the sectors that have the strongest impact on poverty reduction and unleash their potential; if growth happens to concentrate in sectors with scarce pro-poor potential, like commodity-driven growth, redistributive strategies are necessary to compensate the weak effect on poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU-wide survey ' Statistics on Income and Living Conditions' ( EU- SILC) is extremely important for international social science research and policy advice. It is therefore crucial to ensure that the data are of the highest quality and international comparability. This paper is aimed at identifying unexpected developments in income levels, income mobility, and inequality in the EU- SILC data between 2005 and 2009. We examine the consistency of EU- SILC by comparing cross-sectional results with findings based on two-year longitudinal samples. Although the data represent similar populations, for several countries the results of this comparison differ widely. One important outcome is the high degree of variability over time in countries that obtain their income information from register data. This suggests methodological challenges in the clear designation of new subsample members, in the reweighting of the data, in imputation of missing values, and in other areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper implements and adapts the conceptual framework developed by Winters (2002) that identifies the transmission mechanisms between trade policy reform and household welfare outcomes. We make use of household panel data from Vietnam collected in two years, 1992–93 and 1997–98 that span the very earliest years of the reform period and its immediate after effects. Poverty dynamics are modeled using changes in consumption expenditure and poverty transition models. The trade effect is captured by a set of variables that are most likely to have an impact on rural poverty, namely prices of staples and employment in the export sector. We show that trade liberalization has a material and positive effect on rural household welfare and this trade effect is largely transmitted to the poor through the labor market channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Income per capita and most widely reported, non- or non-exclusively income based human well-being indicators are highly correlated among countries. Yet many countries exhibit higher achievement in the latter than predicted by the former. The reverse is true for many other countries. This paper commences by extracting the inter-country variation in a composite of various widely-reported, non-income-based well-being indices not accounted for by variations in income pre capita. This extraction is interpretedinter aliaas a measure of non-economic well-being. The paper then looks at correlations between this extraction and a number of new or less widely-used well-being measures, in an attempt to find the measure that best captures these achievements. A number of indicators are examined, including measures of poverty, inequality, health status, education status, gender bias, empowerment, governance and subjective well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the nature of youth poverty dynamics in Europe. First, it analyzes to what extent experiencing poverty in a given period is in itself positively related to the probability of living below the poverty line again in the future. That is, we assess the degree of poverty genuine state dependence among young people. Second, we study the interrelationships between poverty, employment, and residential emancipation. The results show that youth poverty genuine state dependence is positive and highly significant, but this scarring effect is short-lived in Scandinavia compared to Southern or Continental Europe. Moreover, although we find a strong association between poverty and leaving home in Nordic countries, time spent in economic hardship does not last long. On the contrary, in Spain and Italy, young adults tend to leave their parental home much later in order to avoid falling into a poverty state that is more persistent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this paper has been to summarize the impact of noncash income--health and health education benefits, and imputed rent--on living standards, income distribution and poverty in seven nations at the beginning of the 1980s using the Luxembourg Income Study database. Our results do not give rise to a pattern of national differences in poverty rates or income inequality which are markedly different from that which emerges from previous LIS research based on cash income alone. While these results may be sensitive to the techniques used to measure and value noncash benefits in this paper, it appears that noncash income reinforces the redistributive impact of conventional (cash) tax-transfer mechanisms rather than acting to offset them in any major way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most industrialised nations, women are over-represented in the ranks of the poor. Furthermore, it is often argued that this gender-based disadvantage has increased over time. In this paper the author tests this so-called "feminisation of poverty" hypothesis in Great Britain. Cross-sectional data from three years of the Family Expenditure Survey (1968, 1977 and 1986) are used. A poverty measure that is additively decomposable with population share weights, and is consistent with Sen's axiomatic approach to poverty measurement, is used to decompose the "total" amount of poverty into male and female "shares." Somewhat surprisingly, this decomposition lends no support to the feminisation of poverty hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty is a much used term by politicians, economists, sociologists, the media and interest groups. Although there is some common consensus that the word poverty means some type of deprivation, there is a lack of comprehensive measures to quantify this term. Although deprivation can relate to a number of areas such as health and education, the focus in policy development has been aimed at economic deprivation or more specifically, income adequacy. Even in this perspective, the availability of comprehensive measures are limited. The United States is the only major industrial nation that has an official poverty line. Several unofficial poverty lines have been developed in Canada, but the poverty measures have not gone beyond head counts of people who fall below these lines. In an environment where the goal is to further progressive social development constrained by inadequate public resources, the emphasis has been on first directing scarce resources to those “most in need”. To get a better perception of economic need, this paper provides a micro analysis of the size and distribution of the poverty gap so that meaningful comparisons can be made between demographic groups. The results of this analysis yield some interesting findings. For example, there are virtually no poor elderly couples and although there are a large number of poor single elderly, their income shortfalls are relatively small and are highly concentrated near the poverty line; the poverty rate among families with children is quite low but their incomes on average fall well below the poverty line and are widely dispersed; and single parents fare badly on all measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fuzzy conceptualization of privation has been a step closer to more realistic handling of poverty. However, fuzzy approaches to poverty are still grounded on parametric axioms. Moreover, construction of poverty lines within these approaches still relies on ad-hoc methods. In this paper, we advance instead a fuzzy procedure based on the non-parametric bootstrap method, allowing us to depict fuzzy unidimensional privation states with boundaries drawn spontaneously from data. Fuzzy non-parametric measures of privation within each state as well as a collective fuzzy non-parametric index of poverty are derived, along with their corresponding confidence intervals. The new approach is applied to the analysis of poverty in Tunisia in 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A poverty index should be sensitive to the number of poor people, the extent of the shortfall of the poor, and the inequality among the poor. A difficulty arises when inequality among the poor needs to be assessed. The inequality may be analyzed in terms of either incomes or gaps. Depending on what side we focus on, the inequality level comparisons may be contradictory. This paper proposes a reinterpretation of the inequality component involved in the decompositions of well-known poverty indices. The alternative indices we introduce measure equally the income and gap inequality among the poor. The comparisons in inequality as measured by these indices are then independent of the viewpoint. An empirical application illustrates the proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a particular methodology to render budget data more comparable over highly diverse regions. More specifically, a set of regional poverty lines will be derived and employed as deflators to correct household expenditures for spatial differences in prices and needs. The quality of these deflators depends on the extent to which the underlying poverty lines adhere to the principles of consistency and specificity. Central to reconciling both principles in practice is our pursuit for austerity in setting poverty thresholds as well as the view that differences in social norms mainly reflect differences in social inclusion needs. The particularity of the proposed method compared to standard practice lies in the combination of: (i) the pronounced subdivision in socio-economic strata; (ii) the use of a differential calorie threshold per sector; (iii) the introduction of protein intake; (iv) the derivation of a minimal house rent; and (v) the use of an austere non-food/non-housing allowance. The impact of this method is illustrated using a budget survey of the Democratic Republic of Congo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the gender dimensions of poverty in Egypt and examines the factors that contribute to poverty for different household types. Furthermore, it decomposes the poverty differential between household types into a component due to endowments and another due to the return to these endowments. I use data from five Household Income, Expenditure and Consumption Surveys, that span a period of far reaching economic, social and political changes, from 1999 to 2013. Results suggest that female‐headed households were poorer than male‐headed households for all years under study in urban areas; and slightly less poor over part of the period in rural areas. This difference is greater for widowed mothers. Most of the poverty differentials between female‐headed and male‐headed households cannot be explained by differences in endowments in all years. In fact, if female‐headed households had the same endowments as male‐headed households in urban areas they would have been poorer than they already were. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies welfare dynamics, especially changes associated with middle‐class status in Arab countries. Absent panel data, we construct synthetic panels using repeated cross sections of household expenditure surveys and subjective wellbeing surveys conducted during the 2000s and early 2010s. Objective welfare dynamics indicate mixed trends. About half of the poor in the 2000s moved out of poverty by the end of the decade, but chronic poverty remained high; upward mobility was strong in Syria and Tunisia, but downward mobility was pronounced in Yemen and Egypt. The analysis with subjective wellbeing data suggests negative developments in most countries during the Arab Spring transitions and provides evidence on the eroding middle‐class consensus in Arab countries before and after the Arab Spring. Low education achievement, informal worker status, and rural residency are positively associated with lower chances for upward mobility and greater chances for downward mobility for both types of welfare measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to disentangle the poverty effects of key policy variables that directly affect the poor (namely the government-led channel of development spending and financing) in both agricultural and non-agricultural sectors after accounting for the effect of respective sectoral per capita income and prices, using data from India over five decades. The paper emphasizes the sectoral composition of income and prices as mechanisms influencing the level of poverty and establishes empirically that it is the rise in non-agricultural per capita income that reduces rural poverty via the channel of internal migration, after having controlled for the variation in key components of fiscal spending and monetary/financial policy via the availability of credit. Uneven sectoral growth pattern explains why urban poverty becomes a spill-over of persistent rural poverty when the agricultural sector shrinks. While checking for robustness, there is evidence that the rise in non-agricultural income alone may not reduce rural poverty, when measured in terms of rural infant mortality rate as a non-income indicator of well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the impact of a subsidy-an increase in someone's income-on generalized Gini inequality indices. We show that for any distribution of income there exists a 'pivotal individual' such that an increment given to an individual poorer (resp. richer) than himself, decreases (resp. increases) inequality. We characterize the pivotal individual for relative and absolute Gini indices. We show that normative prescriptions about the preferred level of inequality aversion can also be formulated in terms of the pivotal, namely the richest individual that we find just to compensate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worrying about possible future economic dangers subtracts from the present well-being of individuals, which is why affluent societies have complex systems of private insurance and public social protection to provide a degree of economic security. However, such protections are largely unavailable to the citizens of poor nations (i.e., most of humanity). How can one measure economic security in these very different contexts? This paper examines trends in the IEWB Economic Security Index for four affluent OECD countries and compares a cross-section of 70 rich and poor countries in 2007/08. To reflect better the reality of developing countries, it revises the IEWB index to: (1) include the volatility of food production in the risk of loss of livelihood; (2) adjust the risks of health care costs to consider the proportion of household spending on food (which is non-discretionary, and large in poor countries); and (3) add adult male mortality to the risk of divorce in calculation of the risk of single parent poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An income growth pattern is pro-poor if it reduces a (chosen) measure of poverty by more than if all incomes were growing equiproportionately. Inequality reduction is not sufficient for pro-poorness. In this paper, we explore the nexus between pro-poorness, growth, and inequality in some detail using simulations involving the displaced lognormal, Singh- Maddala, and Dagum distributions. For empirically relevant parameter estimates, distributional change preserving the functional form of each of these three-parameter distributions is often either pro-poor and inequality reducing, or pro-rich and inequality exacerbating, but it is also possible for pro-rich growth to be inequality reducing. There is some capacity for each of these distributions to show trickle effects (weak pro-richness) along with inequality-reducing growth, but virtually no possibility of pro-poorness for growth which increases overall inequality. Implications are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A considerable number of studies have been conducted to measure and analyze the phenomenon of the non‐take‐up of social assistance. However, the homeless portion of this population has long remained outside the scope of this research, so that little is known about their non‐take‐up behavior. In this paper, we focus on this population using a French national survey and we derive measures for the non‐take‐up of French basic income support. Our findings indicate that there is a substantial rate of non‐take‐up among the homeless, but that this rate is lower than that for the general population: approximately 18% of eligible homeless persons do not claim benefits compared to 35% of the general population. Using a large set of variables, we investigate the determinants of non‐take‐up. We show that although some of these determinants are shared with the general population, as identified in the literature, the homeless population exhibits some particularities. Furthermore, our results also suggest that the poorest of the homeless have a larger non‐take‐up rate than other homeless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many low- and middle-income countries are achieving good rates of economic growth, while high inequality remains a priority concern. Some countries meanwhile have low growth, high inequality, and pervasive poverty-often linked to their fragility. There is now active debate on how countries should set themselves goals for achieving both absolute poverty reduction and lower inequality. But policy action needs to be better served by analysis and data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the poverty impact of the violent events that affected Rwanda in the 1990s. The main objective of the paper is to identify systematically potential mechanisms linking violent conflict with changes in poverty across provinces and households in Rwanda before and after a decade of violence. In accordance with emerging literature on the long-term economic effects of violent conflict, we find empirical evidence for economic convergence between richer and poorer Rwandan provinces and households following the conflict shocks. Using a small but unique panel of households surveyed before and after the conflict period, we find that households whose house was destroyed or who lost land ran a higher risk of falling into poverty. We do not find much evidence for an economic effect of violent deaths at the household level due to substitution effects of labor within the household. Non-violent deaths however seem to increase income per adult equivalent for the survivors. Results are shown to be robust to sample selection and IV models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the performance of a method of predicting poverty rates. Because most developing countries cannot justify the expense of frequent household budget surveys, additional low-cost methods have been developed and used. The prediction method is based on a model linking the proportion of poor households to suitable explanatory variables (consumption proxies). These consumption proxies are variables that can be collected at much lower cost through smaller annual surveys. Several applications have shown that such models can produce poverty estimates with confidence intervals of a similar magnitude to the poverty estimates from the household budget surveys. There is, however, limited evidence of how well the methods perform out-of-sample. A series of seven household budget surveys conducted in Uganda in the period 1993-2005 allows us to test the prediction performance of the model. We test the poverty models by using data from one survey to predict the proportion of poor households in other surveys, and vice versa. The results are encouraging, as all models predict similar poverty trends. Although in most cases the predictions are precise, sometimes they differ significantly from the poverty level estimated from the survey directly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]