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We investigate whether greater economic insecurity increases distrust in government and fosters authoritarian politics. Using the 2016 American National Election Studies dataset, we build on the literature regarding “egotropic" and “sociotropic" economic concerns to distinguish between “micro" insecurity (perceived insecurity regarding the individual’s own personal economic well-being), and “macro" insecurity (negative expectations concerning the macro economy). Our results suggest micro insecurity is not significantly correlated with attitudinal differences, but macro-level insecurity is associated with increased levels of political distrust, accompanied by greater authoritarianism. Greater macro-level insecurity is also associated with more negative feelings toward “out-groups" (e.g. Muslims, the LGBTQ+ community, feminists, immigrants) and was a key predictor in reduced affinity for Hillary Clinton and the rise in support for Donald Trump. Results are robust to controls for political affiliation and aggregate macroeconomic indicators, suggesting that rising levels of income inequality and weakening social safety nets increase political polarization and encourage xenophobia, racism, and homophobia.

Composite indices have been prominently used in poverty research. However, validity of these indices remains subject to debate. This paper examines the validity of a common type of composite poverty indices using data from a cross-sectional survey of 2477 households in urban and rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Multiple-group comparisons in structural equation modelling were employed for testing differences in the measurement model across urban and rural groups. The analysis revealed substantial variations between urban and rural respondents both in the conceptualisation of poverty as well as in the weights and importance assigned to individual poverty indicators. The validity of a ‘one size fits all’ measurement model can therefore not be confirmed. In consequence, it becomes virtually impossible to determine a household’s poverty level relative to the full sample. Findings from our analysis have important practical implications in nuancing how we can sensitively use composite poverty indices to identify poor people. peerReviewed

We construct a regional comprehensive wealth as an indicator of sustainability in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Of particular interest is the change in wealth before and after a natural disaster, since the index could serve as a benchmark of investment into post-disaster reconstruction. We first discuss an optimum spatial unit of wealth accounting and sustainability analysis. The resultant regional wealth index had already been slightly declining during the 2000s due to stagnant investment into capital assets, oil capital loss, and budget deficit burden, until a natural disaster made the region significantly unsustainable. This wealth trend also differs from what emerges from the figures in Inclusive Wealth Report 2012. Including population decrease makes the wealth per capita look better, whose interpretation warrants caution due to the neglected forward-looking demographic change in a developed nation., First online: 24 September 2015

Time-use data are old and familiar in survey research, with the first rudimentary efforts going back nearly a century; and large-scale regularly collected data sets have been available in other countries (e.g., Germany, France) since 1965. It is only with the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) since 2003, however, that the US has moved from the derri?re to the avant garde of data quality and quantity in the area of time-use surveys. With a large fraction of the economics profession resident in the US, and with American scholarly economics journals being the most prestigious outlets for economists worldwide, the advent of these data and the wider availability of similar, albeit smaller and/or irregular time-use surveys from other countries present economists with exciting opportunities. The difficulty with these data sets is that they offer us the temptation of the quick tabulation and the simple regression on items that economists have not previously dis cussed: It is very easy to present information on gender differences in time spent in various categories of home production, leisure and personal maintenance and to adjust these for a wide array of other demographic characteristics. It is simple to examine how employment status is correlated with the kinds of non-market activities that people undertake, and even to study how one's spouse's employment status relates to one's non-market activities. Economists can do these calculations, we have done them and, no doubt will continue to produce this kind of research. But where is the economics? What do we have to offer here that could not be done at least as well by sociologists? Unless economists think like economists?use economic theory to model behavior related to time use, discover facts that might alter our theories, and generate predictions derived from those modified theories, we have nothing special to offer in this area. Economists should leave demographic accounting of time use to folks in other disci plines?they may have an absolute advantage in such research, and we certainly lack a comparative advantage in it. What subjects can we as economists study with these data? A by no means exhaustive list of research areas, in some of which a few early studies have already been generated, might include

The relation between the amount of medals won at the Olympic games and various welfare indicators has been established for the games of Barcelona and Seoul using a Bayesian method of Poisson regression. It was found that medals won correlate strongly with income as well as with more general welfare indicators and that the elasticity with respect to the size of the population is surprisingly smaller than unity.

The paper argues on the basis of data from Young Lives, an international study of childhood poverty, and an extensive review of child-centred poverty studies that experiences of relative poverty and social exclusion are as common and corrosive in contemporary Ethiopia as North America and Europe. If taken seriously, this insight could broaden the focus of child poverty reduction from nutrition and education to include the psychosocial costs of lacking the culturally-specific resources required for full participation in society. The paper makes a number of methodological points of value to researchers undertaking similar studies: firstly, poverty can be explored by asking about illbeing; secondly, children's conceptions of poverty are profoundly social and context-specific; and thirdly, young children are just as able to address these themes as older ones.

Despite a wide under-prioritization, the issue of child poverty has received increasing attention worldwide over the last decade. The acknowledgement in Vietnam that child-specific poverty measurement is crucial for poverty efforts directed towards children, and the current lack thereof, instigated the development of a Vietnam child poverty approach. This paper proposes a country-specific, multidimensional and outcome-based approach for the measurement of the incidence, depth and severity of child poverty. It does so at the level of the individual child using household survey data. The development of such an approach at the level of the individual child presents an appropriate alternative for or supplement to the widely used monetary poverty approach, allowing for the use of compatible analytical methods. Findings suggest that 37% of all children in Vietnam live in poverty, with the most pressing areas of deprivation being water, sanitation and leisure. We do not find evidence for a gender bias but do observe a large urban–rural divide, regional disparities and large ethnic inequalities. We argue that this tailor-made approach is a valuable new tool for policy makers and analysts in Vietnam as it enables identification and analysis of poor children, their characteristics and most pressing areas of deprivation within the country’s specific social and cultural context.

The notion of poverty as an experience of multiple deprivation has been widely acknowledged. In Indonesia, however, poverty assessment has almost exclusively been conducted within the monetary space; even when multidimensionality is admitted, it has always been computed using variants of marginal method that are indifferent to joint deprivation. Applying a novel measurement method that is sensitive to both the incidence and the intensity of multiple deprivation to data from the National Socio-economic Survey (Susenas), this paper investigates the extent and the patterns of multidimensional poverty in Indonesia from 2003 to 2013 (\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$N=7{,}148{,}964$$\end{document}N=7,148,964). An Indonesian version of the multidimensional poverty index is constructed by augmenting the existing consumption poverty measure with information on health and education. Results suggest that there was an unambiguous poverty reduction over the last decade at both national and sub-national levels. The data also reveal that progress has been inclusive across population subgroups, although spatial variation remains notable. The new poverty measurement method proves to be easily adaptable to the Indonesian context and could complement the methods currently employed by the Indonesian Statistical Bureau.

This paper applies the ‘time lag’ method to a set of social and economic indicators, examining the development of Central and Eastern Europe since the first world war. Originally used to assess technology diffusion, this method allows comparison of levels of development between states and through a long period of time. It presents how many years have elapsed between achieving a certain level of development between countries. The results show that the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have only narrowly converged with a set of 23 highly-developed ‘benchmark’ states. Development in monetary terms (gross domestic product per capita) is the indicator where this region lags most. Employment structure, life expectancy or infant mortality show much smaller lags. Communist states were closest to the West in the 1960s–early 1970s and struggled thereafter. They are still mostly lagging more today than at their peak before transformation despite the progress achieved in absolute terms after the fall of centrally-planned economy. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11205-015-0991-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

One of the most frequent critiques of the HDI is that is does not take into account inequality within countries in its three dimensions. In this paper, we apply a simply approach to compute the three components and the overall HDI for quintiles of the income distribution. This allows a comparison of the level in human development of the poor with the level of the non-poor within countries, but also across countries. This is an application of the method presented in Grimm et al. (World Development 36(12):2527–2546, 2008) to a sample of 21 low and middle income countries and 11 industrialized countries. In particular the inclusion of the industrialized countries, which were not included in the previous work, implies to deal with a number of additional challenges, which we outline in this paper. Our results show that inequality in human development within countries is high, both in developed and industrialized countries. In fact, the HDI of the lowest quintiles in industrialized countries is often below the HDI of the richest quintile in many middle income countries. We also find, however, a strong overall negative correlation between the level of human development and inequality in human development. peerReviewed

A substantial literature has studied gender differences in political participation in Western industrialized democracies, but little is known about such gaps in sub-Saharan African nations. Using 2005 Afrobarometer data, this paper presents a systematic investigation of the gender gap in political participation across 18 sub-Saharan African countries. In line with cultural isomorphism, patterns in gender gaps across different types of participation generally mirror those of Western democracies, with small to no gender gaps in registration to vote, but substantial gaps in less institutionalized types of participation. Yet, the remaining large gaps cannot be explained by gender differences in socioeconomic characteristics and political attitudes as suggested in studies on Western industrialized nations. Finally, substantial cross-national differences within the sub-Saharan African are found, substantiating the importance of more fine-grained examinations of variation across sub-Saharan African nations.

This paper is concerned with the requirements for and implications of, moving from the confines of the conventional concept of the digital divide to one that reflects a world distribution of Internet users with different income levels, with particular reference to those users living in poverty. The first part of the note provides a simple, sequential, two-country illustration of what such a transition would entail. The resulting framework is then used to revisit the much-discussed issue of recent changes in Internet use between rich and poor countries. One mechanism that is associated with the revised concept is shown to substantially reduce the size of the digital divide as conventionally measured. The other mechanism, by contrast, works in the opposite direction because the increased number of users in developing countries are drawn from high-income, educated and urban classes, creating a highly unequal distribution within these countries.