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This paper investigates the effect of reducing inequality in household education, health and access to credit on pro-poor growth in Cameroon using the 2001 and 2007 Cameroon household consumption surveys. Results indicate that education and access to credit registered relative pro-poor growth driven by a fall in inequality. However, health failed to record pro-poor growth due to an increase in health-inequality at the bottom of the welfare distribution. In addition, equalizing education, health and access to credit among households, would increase average growth in household spending and pro-poor growth.

Most poverty research has explored monetary poverty. This chapter presents and analyzes the global multidimensional poverty index (MPI) estimations for China. Using China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we find China’s global MPI was 0.035 in 2010 and decreased significantly to 0.017 in 2014. The dimensional composition of MPI suggests that nutrition, education, safe drinking water, and cooking fuel contribute most to overall non-monetary poverty in China. Such analysis is also applied to subgroups, including geographic areas (rural/urban, east/central/west, provinces), as well as social characteristics such as gender of the household heads, age, education level, marital status, household size, migration status, ethnicity, and religion. We find the level and composition of poverty differs significantly across certain subgroups. We also find high levels of mismatch between monetary and multidimensional poverty at the household level, which highlights the importance of using both complementary measures to track progress in eradicating poverty.

This paper investigates the effect of household size, and in particular of the number of children of different age groups, on poverty, defined as being in a situation of low income. We apply various static and dynamic probit models to control for the endogeneity of the variables of interest and to account for unobserved heterogeneity, state dependence, and serially correlated error components. Using Luxembourg longitudinal data, we show that the number of children of different age groups significantly affects the probability of being poor. However, the magnitude of the effect varies across different specifications. In addition, we find strong evidence of true poverty persistency due to past experience, spurious poverty persistency due to individual heterogeneity, and transitory random shocks.

There has been a rapid expansion in the literature on the measurement of multidimensional poverty in recent years. This paper focuses on the longitudinal aspects of multidimensional poverty and its link to dynamic income poverty measurement. Using panel household survey data in Vietnam from 2007, 2008, and 2010, the paper analyses the prevalence and dynamics of both multidimensional and monetary poverty from the same dataset. The results show that the monetary poor (or non-poor) are not always multidimensionally poor (or non-poor) – indeed the overlap between the two measures is much less than 50 percent. Additionally, monetary poverty shows faster progress as well as a higher level of fluctuation than multidimensional poverty. We suggest that rapid economic growth as experienced by Vietnam has had a larger and more immediate impact on monetary than on multidimensional poverty.

Looking at the Jewish population in Israel in 1995 this paper compares three multidimensional approaches to poverty measurement and checks to what extent they identify the same households as poor. Logit regressions are then estimated to understand which variables have an impact on poverty. Finally, the so-called Shapley decomposition is introduced to estimate the exact marginal impact of these determinants of poverty.

Of particular interest to this study was the combined effect of the generation to which the head of the household belongs and his/her place of birth. It turns out that the ethnic origin has a significant impact on multidimensional poverty in Israel insofar as being a head of household born in Asia or Africa, whatever the generation to which one belongs, increases, ceteris paribus, the probability of being poor.

In 2020, household incomes were severely hit by the lockdowns imposed across the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from the last available wave of the euro-area harmonized Household Finance and Consumption Survey for 2016, this chapter documents European households’ financial resilience to this shock, based on pre-shock balance sheets, potential exposure to COVID-19, and in the absence of government interventions. The results highlight that there are large and similar shares of the population across European countries that are likely to suffer from the economic fallout of containment measures – albeit through different channels.

Latin America experienced a long period of sustained growth since 2003 that positively impacted social and labor market indicators, including poverty. This paper contributes to the understanding of this process as it carries out a comparative study of poverty and indigence dynamics in five Latin American countries during 2003–2012. Specifically, it extends the analysis of a previously published study by broadening the time coverage and examining indigence mobility. It analyzes the extent to which countries with different levels of poverty (extreme poverty) incidence diverge in terms of exit and entry rates, and identifies the relative importance of the frequency and impact of events associated with poverty transitions. For this, a dynamic analysis of panel data is carried out using regular household surveys. Sizeable rates of poverty and indigence movements were observed in all five countries and it was found that a large proportion of poor or indigent households experienced positive events, mainly related to the labor market; however, only a small fraction of them actually exited poverty and indigence. It appeared, therefore, that even when the economy behaved reasonably well, high levels of labor turnover and income mobility (even of a negative nature) still prevail, mainly associated with the high level of precariousness and the undeveloped system of social protection that characterize the studied countries.

During the last two decades the share of foreign-born residents in Italy has grown considerably, from just over 1 percent to about 8 percent. This chapter seeks to clarify the status of immigrants in Italy by examining the evolution of their economic situation and, in particular, the presence of economic hardship. Poverty is measured by considering not only the usual income-based indicators but also others that take into account households’ real and financial wealth. The picture that emerges is one of a higher incidence of economic hardship among immigrant households that strongly affects the dynamics of poverty nationwide. The economic gap with respect to natives appears to increase in the years considered, but the condition of poverty is not more persistent for immigrants than for Italians.

Children in Malaysia, just as children in many other countries, are vulnerable to poverty. They are exposed to different forms of deprivation and the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated their predicament. Concerns have been raised about the impact of the pandemic on children’s well-being, as this health crisis had intensified the educational and economic disparities among children in Malaysia, and for some children the impact will be lifelong. It is important to recognise the multidimensionality of poverty in regard to deprivation among poor children; however, such concerns are less pronounced in public policy discussions. Demands for greater policy attention intensified following the increasing number of unemployed parents and bereaved children who lost their parents due to the pandemic. The scope of poverty alleviation policies failed to consider the varying poverty gaps between recipients and the various forms of deprivation experienced by children in poor and larger sized households. As a result, the allocation of funds for the improvement of children’s well-being has been insignificant. The aim of this chapter is to provide a thorough overview of child poverty in developed and developing countries and how child poverty has changed in Malaysia. The analysis in this chapter seeks to provide deep insights on the development of policies that address poverty among children in Malaysia. An analysis on budget appropriations reveals that efforts to address other dimensions of child development were steadily improved, but policy commitments for such purposes need to be intensified in the post-pandemic era when hundreds of thousands of families and children have been plunged into poverty. It is timely for policymakers to acknowledge the need for separate policy considerations for children since they experience poverty differently from adults. The fulfilment of their needs should be prioritised, and the recognition of this fact would produce desirable plans of action for children living in poverty.

The authors propose a framework to estimate the probability of being poor in a dynamic setting based on a large information set that includes individual characteristics and macro-economic variables. The joint inclusion of personal characteristics along with contextual factors allows separation of idiosyncratic shocks from aggregate shocks affecting poverty. The authors combine data from different cross-sectional surveys and fit a dynamic logistic hierarchical model within a Bayesian framework using standard Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques. The authors’ approach is exemplified by estimating household poverty status in Kyrgyz Republic as a function of time, regions, country, regional level variables and household level socio-demographic characteristics.