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An examination of household expenditures as reflected in the Family Expenditure Surveys of 1979-92 revealed trends that differ markedly from changes in household incomes gleaned from earlier surveys. Though no single measure can be reflective of all the aspects of living standards, expenditure may be the most ideal since it factors in the possibility that households will smooth consumption when income is variable. The inequality in expenditure increased rapidly between the early 1980s and early 1990s, though not as much as income inequality.

The rapid growth in inequality of incomes in the UK offers proof of increasing permanent inequality and increasing short-term income risk. A comparison of cohorts has revealed that younger cohorts experience remarkably greater inequality than did older cohorts at the same age. Minimal changes and increases were also noted for measures of poverty based on incomes for younger cohorts, whereas measures based on expenditures have usually been on the decline in the 1980s.

This article uses newly available data on the height of 'habitual criminals' born in Britain between 1812 and 1857 to assess changes in male and female living standards. The data show an unequivocal decline in average heights from the end of the Napoleonic wars to the 1850s, with the most rapid decline occurring in the 1840s. This finding suggests that there was a major deterioration in environmental, nutritional or employment conditions for British workers in this period which is not reflected in real wage data.

This paper incorporates children's perspectives on the issue of resource distribution in households. It is part of a relatively new trend of sociological explorations into childhood. The paper aims to review earlier studies and literature on children's access to money, food, space and time. The data illuminates norms governing distributive justice between adults and children in families.

In examining the economic status of single-parent families, the tendency has been to aggregate rural and urban families. This study examines the characteristics, income, and spending of single-parent families in the two areas separately using data from the 1990-92 Consumer Expenditure Survey. A significantly higher proportion of urban than rural single parents were never married. Slightly over one-fourth of single parents in both areas did not have a high school diploma. A significantly greater percentage of rural than urban single-parent families received alimony and child support, but a smaller percentage received public assistance. Before-tax income of rural families was significantly lower compared with urban families ($16,060 vs. $18,430). Housing accounted for the largest share of total expenses for both groups. A significantly higher proportion of rural than urban single-parent families owned a home, with 29 percent of all rural single-parent families residing in a mobile home. These results can give policymakers and professionals who develop programs targeted to single-parent families a better understanding of the differences in the two groups.

Data covering the period 1987-1989 and dealing with the effect of social policy on poverty in Hungary was evaluated. This undertaking was in line with the intent to find out to what degree social safety nets such as cash benefits could protect people from going below the poverty line or promote people to a higher standard of living. Results showed that such policies merely protected individuals from getting poorer although they did not appreciably extricate them from their present conditions.

Agricultural households in developing countries are vulnerable to idiosyncratic shocks that directly affect crop or agricultural income. These shocks also indirectly affect wealth through household attempts at consumption protection from such shocks. Credit market accessibility affects interhousehold differences in vulnerability to income shocks. In India, well-developed labor markets alleviate the impact of income shocks by increasing labor market hours.

Recent research has shown significant changes in income inequality and real living standards in the UK since 1979. However, research has failed to document the changes in the pattern of inequality prior to that time. To remedy this problem, the changing patterns in income inequality and real living standards in the UK from 1961 to 1991 are analyzed using detailed information on the incomes and characteristics of some 200,000 households.

Variations in cost-of-living indices between different types of UK households are studied. Chained series of pairwise Tornqvist indices are used in calculating the indices. Alternative all-item cost-of-living indices are also calculated using two possible methods of calculating housing costs. Results suggest small differences in the growth ofcost of living at the end of the period. However, the top and bottom of the income distribution and between demographic groups had widely varying inflation rates.

In this paper we assess whether it is changing needs or intertemporal substitution that dominate household expenditure responses to the presence of children over the life-cycle. We construct lifetime expenditure paths for households with different demographic profiles and consider the shape of these paths and some possible implications for welfare measures. Simulated expenditure paths based on consistent single-period and multi-period models indicate that it is indeed changing needs that dominate such paths in periods when children are present in the household. However, allowing for intertemporal substitution is still shown to be important since it can introduce new information relevant to the calculation of household welfare.

Cross-section estimates of income elasticities for food staples in the aggregate based on quantity information from household food expenditure surveys are often in the 0.3-0.6 range. It is shown that differences in per capita calorie intakes across income groups implied by these income elasticities are grossly inconsistent with observed differences in bodyweights. Moreover, time series data frequently indicate that national per capita consumption of food staples in the aggregate remains constant even as per capita gross national product rises substantially. Cross-section income elasticity estimates are biased upwards due to the failure of food expenditure surveys to undertake an accurate accounting of food transfers from high to low income groups, biases which are not generated by survey techniques which record food intakes directly.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the parameters of household preferences that determine the allocation of goods within the period and over the life cycle, using micro data. In doing so we are able to identify important effects of demographics, labour market status and other household characteristics on the intertemporal allocation of expenditure. We test the validity of the life-cycle model using excess sensitivity tests and find that controlling for demographics and labour market status variables can largely explain the excess sensitivity of consumption to anticipated changes in income.

In this article, the authors use a special data set compiled for 60 U.S. metropolitan areas to examine 1970-1980 trends in the distribution of family income and shifts in the degree of segregation between income groups. They document how these changes contributed to increases in the spatial concentration of affluence and poverty during the 1970s and estimate simple descriptive models that connect these outcomes to broader socioeconomic trends in U.S. urban areas.

A detailed survey of mortality is used to analyse the determinants of premature death in rural China. Premature death is found to be inversely related to income: higher income in a county reduces its mortality rate, ceteris paribus. The inverse relationship is found for most major illnesses, and might be explained by the large element of self-reliance in the funding of health care expenditures in China, both at the household and the local levels. These and other results are used to address the basic question: why has there been a remarkable decline in premature mortality in China since the early 1950s? The contributions of income, of deliberate health care policies and of collective organisation are examined., I. INTRODUCTION Many of the determinants of the welfare of poor people are not well measured by the market value of the commodities they consume or the money income they [...]

Our ultimate objective is to enhance the standard of living of our societies. But the standard of living has different meanings for different people. A thorough investigation of the concept of the standard of living has been made only recently by Sen, who defines it in terms of functioning and capabilities. Functioning is an achievement, whereas capability is the ability to achieve. The main objective of the present paper is to compare achievements (levels) and improvement (changes) in the standard of living across countries. Using an axiomatic approach, an achievement index is derived which accommodates the view that a further increase in the standard of living of a country when it is already at a higher level signifies an achievement greater than that of another with an equal increase but from a lower base. The paper also tests for the statistical relationship between indicators of the countries' standards of living so derived in their per capita GDP. The question posed is whether the aggregate income which provides people with the means to achieve a better life, can be used as a proxy measure of the standard living and extent to which the country's improvement in the standard of living can be explained by the levels and changes in the per capita income. The analysis presented in the paper is based on the data from 80 developing countries.

The study raises the question of whether it is possible to verify Rowntree's and Chayanov's models of recurrent poverty and economic tensions during the life course of proletarian families, by using recent French studies on peasants and urban workers since the seventeenth century. Using evidence from preindustrial France about the poor, the study examines family size and the amplitude of social differentiation in the rural and urban context. The number of children living at home does not appear to have a negative influence on the standard of living. No correlation was found in Rheims between the appearance or non-appearance of families on the tax rolls and the vital evolution of the family life course. These findings indicate the absence of family-regulated poverty over time.

The sensitivity of the cost-of-living to changes in the prices of commodities and monetary aggregates is examined. Likelihood ratio tests and maximum likelihood estimations are conducted to examine the effects of these changes on the cost-of-living. Results show that price- and income-induced changes substantially affected consumer tastes on the cost-of-living in the US from 1947 to 1975.

The purpose of this research is to examine the relationship between psychological well-being and objective, economic well-being as measured using three different economic theories of consumption behavior. The theories examined are the life cycle income hypothesis, the relative income hypothesis, and a resource deficit hypothesis. The results from analyses of the Wisconsin Basic Needs Study data demonstrate the importance of careful economic variable construction and support the economic presumption that income and life satisfaction are positively related. The relative income hypothesis model accounts for the greatest explained variance and is also superior in that it is easier to specify. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.), This paper examines the relationships between subjective assessments of well-being and objective economic variables to test and compare three different economic theories of consumption behavior: Modigliani's life cycle income hypothesis [...]

A study on family financial management showed that satisfaction with preparation for financial emergencies was positively affected by household managerial behaviour. One suchimportant managerial behavior is regular saving wherein the greater amount of savings elicited greater satisfaction. Age and monthly salary were the major predictors of the managerial behavior index and monthly debt payment. Such findings would prove useful to educators, financial counsellors and financial institutions to help raise the satisfaction level of consumers with domestic finances.

The wide range of calorie-income elasticities in the literature results, in large part, from the particular calorie and income variables used for estimation. Elasticities across four estimation techniques and four calorie-income variable pairs for a sample of Philippine farm households, ranged from 0.03 to 0.59. Estimates associated with calorie availability are biased upwards, first, because random errors in measuring food purchases are transmitted (by construction) both to calorie availability and total expenditures, and second, because the residual difference between family calorie intake and household calorie availability will often increase with income. The calorie intake-total expenditure variable pair gives the preferred elasticity estimate in the 0.08-0.14 range.

The Theil - Tornqvist (TT) index is a well-known index for binary comparisons of cost-of-living and for comparisons of prices, real output and productivity. Caves, Christensen, and Diewert (CCD) propose a multilateral method based on a simple averaging procedure that is consistent and base-invariant. The aim of this paper is to derive the TT, CCD, and a generalized CCD multilateral index (which takes into account a measure of economic distance between the different price and quantity vectors) using an econometric model. The problem of bias in the estimation of the TT index in its multiplicative form is considered and a class of UMVUEs of the indices and their standard errors are derived. A numerical illustration using the price and quantity data for sixty countries from the Phase IV of the International Comparisons Project is also included.

There are many difficulties in the construction of a model that encapsulates the effect children have on household economic behavior. Among these difficulties is capturing the effect of children on demand patterns, consumption, the costs of children, labor supply, as well as the effect of fertility on labor supply. Suggestions are presented to encapsulate the effects via economic statistical techniques. Further research is recommended.

The identification of the poor in this paper follows that of most contemporary applied work and consists of comparing a scaler indicator of welfare with a predetermined minimum level. The data is provided by the 1985 Family Expenditure Survey. Two measures of welfare are developed, one based on income which reflects the entitlement analysis of poverty and the other on expenditure, reflecting the standard of living. Households ranked very low by expenditure are considerably less likely to be ranked highly by income than vice versa. Further doubt on the rankings suggested by the income measure is provided by ownership of consumer durables. The expenditure measure suggests that the number of poor retired individuals is more than three times that implied by the income measure. The instability of the latter measure suggests that more confidence can be placed on assertions based on evidence employing the expenditure measure.

Chang, Gene Hsin -- Immiserizing Growth in Centrally Planned Economies This paper proposes a theoretical model explaining the discrepancy between the reported growth rate and the improvement in living standards in centrally planned economies (CPEs). It investigates the institutional arrangement in CPEs and suggests that distorted growth generally takes place as the CPEs' planners attempt to achieve rapid economic growth while prices are kept constant. This leads to an overestimation of the growth rate in terms of the actual economic welfare improvements in CPEs. It can result in immiserizing growth, wherein a rapid growth is accompanied by a deterioration in economic welfare. J. Comp. Econom., December 1991, 15(4), pp. 711-717. The University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio 43606.

This article analyzes the factors that caused the economic well-being of children in the United States to deteriorate during the 1980s. The poverty rate for children decreased through the late 1960s and the 1970s but rose during the 1980s. Young families and female-headed families were hit hardest by structural economic changes, contributing to the rise in child poverty. In addition, although more children became poor, social services provision did not increase and in many instances was cut back. The juvenilization of poverty requires social workers to place themselves in advocacy roles and to focus on poverty as a central practice concern.

The higher average rents and food-staple costs in the urban areas of developing countries suggests that the cost-of-living is higher in those areas. However, the higher average quality of urban housing and the existence of substitution possibilities with other goods in urban areas suggest such a simple comparison overestimates the true cost-of-living differential. An economic demand model for housing and food staples applied to a household data set for the island of Java in Indonesia indicates that traditional rent and price models do lead to an overestimation of true cost-of-living in cities. The overestimation is more pronounced at lower income levels, because the the marginal cost of utility is greater in urban areas, suggesting the cost of urban living is directly proportional to income.

A study was conducted to examine a joint framework for wage changes and cost of living allowances at various manufacturing companies in Spain. The relationship between non-indexed wage and market conditions were analyzed. The study also examined institutional factors that influence the country's labor market. Results indicated that workers pay a significant ex-ante change premium to realize a cost of living allowance clause. Findings also showed spillover effects in wage setting.