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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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to test the impact of financial development (FD) indicators, namely banking and stock market (SM) indicators, on the household final consumption expenditure as a poverty index.

The authors study an international sample of 138 countries over the period 1980-2014. A series of estimation methods are used on different measures of bank-based and stock-based FD. Subgroups of countries, namely low, middle, upper-middle and high-income countries are also investigated.

In the study, the authors concluded that FD fails to reach the poorest segments of each society in the international sample. For the selected subgroups of countries, the authors concluded that the impact of the bank and the SM indicators, on the poorest population segments, changes depending on, the estimated FD variables, the selected group of countries and the adopted estimation technique.

The present study recommends appropriate economic and financial reforms, with focus on the roles of banks and SM roles to reduce poverty and stimulate channels that allow the poorest population to exploit from financial services.

This paper is the first of its kind to empirically examine, separately, the impact of banks development and SM development, on an international panel and subgroups of countries, using modern econometric techniques.

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.

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.

Nowadays, informed decision-making is catching up. Technological advancements and computing ability further fuel and facilitate this tilt toward informed decision-making. In such a scenario, data is cynosure. Therefore, the ability to gather data by a nation (incredibly accurate public data) becomes equally important and relevant, as measured by statistical performance indicators (SPI). This study aims to explore the association of financial inclusion (FI); environmental, social and governance (ESG); poverty; and SPI.

The panel data of 140 nations for nine years are gathered to explore the association of FI, ESG and poverty with the SPI. Panel data estimation is conducted to arrive at the results.

The findings of this study highlight mixed outcomes for FI. ESG is positively associated with SPI, but poverty is not associated with SPI. These findings imply that an increase in FI may reduce the statistical capacity of the nations. An increase in ESG increases the capacity. However, change in poverty does not influence the SPI. The recommendation based on this study’s outcome suggests auditing the FI and poverty vis-à-vis SPI to ensure SPI’s veracity and robustness in the long run.

The way in which the individual social, economic and environmental indicators influence the SPI needs to be tested to establish the veracity and robustness of the SPI, which is barely researched as observed in the literature.

This paper examines the impact of financial inclusion on poverty through access to mobile money in developing economies.

The authors employ the principal component analysis to construct an index of financial inclusion using demand and supply indicators, including mobile accounts. The authors use the two-step system GMM estimator for the analysis because of its efficiency and robustness in addressing heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation.

The main finding is that financial inclusion generally increased and significantly reduces poverty in the sample period. Furthermore, income inequality worsens poverty.

This study has few limitations. First, the empirical analysis of the study is restricted to macroeconomic factors only because of limited Household Finance Survey data set and time availability. Second, the study is limited to developing countries and the results cannot be generalized.

Financial inclusion is a significant policy tool for poverty reduction. There is the need to enhance strategies that further improve financial inclusion by expanding and improving the use of mobile money accounts.

The paper sheds light on how developing countries can harness financial inclusion to reduce poverty.

The paper differs from the previous studies in two ways. Firstly, mobile money account is included in the computation of financial inclusion index over the sample period. It also determines the impact of financial inclusion on poverty for short-run and long-run periods.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-11-2021-0690

This paper is a study on child poverty from two perspectives: child income poverty (derived from family income) and child deprivation (evaluated by non‐monetary indicators). On the one hand, empirical evidence supports the thesis that income‐based poverty measures and deprivation measures do not overlap. On the other hand, the relationship between poverty and the child's living conditions is not linear. Uses micro‐econometric techniques to analyse child income poverty and present deprivation indicators, and thereby an index of child deprivation, to study child poverty. The measurements used are centred on the child. The results obtained support the thesis that the study of child poverty differs whether the focus is on the child or on the family.

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.