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1 – 10 of over 4000During 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…
Abstract
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.
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María Emma Santos, María Ana Lugo, Luis Felipe López-Calva, Guillermo Cruces and Diego Battistón
Latin America has a longstanding tradition in multidimensional poverty measurement through the unsatisfied basic needs (UBN) approach. However, the method has been criticized on…
Abstract
Latin America has a longstanding tradition in multidimensional poverty measurement through the unsatisfied basic needs (UBN) approach. However, the method has been criticized on several grounds, including the selection of indicators, the implicit weighting scheme and the aggregation methodology, among others. The estimates by the UBN approach have traditionally been complemented (or replaced) with income poverty estimates. Under the premise that poverty is inherently multidimensional, in this chapter we propose three methodological refinements to the UBN approach. Using the proposed methodology we provide a set of comparable poverty estimates for six Latin American countries between 1992 and 2006.
Van Q. Tran, Sabina Alkire and Stephan Klasen
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…
Abstract
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.
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This paper examines several measures of poverty and hardship for the United States to illustrate how a single measure of poverty may identify different groups of people as “in…
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This paper examines several measures of poverty and hardship for the United States to illustrate how a single measure of poverty may identify different groups of people as “in need.” Individuals and families may encounter difficulty meeting needs on many dimensions and there are a variety of measures designed to identify those who experience poverty or difficulty making ends meet. In general, there is agreement that all of the approaches capture different pieces of the puzzle while no single indicator can yield a complete picture. To understand this multidimensional aspect of poverty, several measures are examined in this paper: the official U.S. poverty measure, a relative poverty measure, a new supplemental measure that follows recommendations of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), an index of material hardship, a measure of household debt, and responses to a question about inability to meet expenses. This study uses the 2008 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and updates a similar analysis that used the 1996 panel of SIPP (Short, 2005). The SIPP is a longitudinal survey that allows us to examine all of these various indicators for the same people over the period from 2009 to 2010. The study uses regression analysis to assess the relationship among several indicators of economic hardship. Results suggest that an understanding of relationships between various indicators can allow only one indicator of poverty alone to be interpreted more appropriately and used more wisely to target the needs of the disadvantaged.
This paper compares two alternative methods for measuring multidimensional poverty. This question has become extremely important in recent years, both in the scientific literature…
Abstract
This paper compares two alternative methods for measuring multidimensional poverty. This question has become extremely important in recent years, both in the scientific literature and in social policy. We propose to use latent class analysis to evaluate poverty in Spain. We make use of the “fuzzy set” approach, and compare the results achieved from these two methodologies.
Joseph Deutsch and Jacques Silber
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…
Abstract
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.
Adrian Robles and Marcos Robles
This paper argues that the assumption of a homogeneous workforce, which is implicitly invoked in the decomposition analysis of changes in welfare indicators, hides the role that…
Abstract
This paper argues that the assumption of a homogeneous workforce, which is implicitly invoked in the decomposition analysis of changes in welfare indicators, hides the role that schooling and its returns may have on the understanding of these changes. Using Peruvian cross-sectional data for a period of 10 years (2004–2013) and counterfactual simulations, this paper finds that the main factor contributing to poverty reduction has been individuals’ changes in labor earnings, and the role of these changes has been less important in reducing income inequality. The main driving force of reduced income inequality has been the fall in returns to education, which at the same time has been one of the important factors to constraining the period’s remarkable progress in poverty reduction and expansion of the middle class.
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