QUANTIFYING ABSOLUTE POVERTY IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD

We estimate that in 1985 about one in five persons in the developing world lived in poverty, judged by the standards of the poorest countries. This rises to one in three at a common, more generous, poverty line. The aggregate consumption short-fall of the poorest fifth is about one half of one percent of world consumption, while that of the poorest third is a further one percent. The shape of the distribution of consumption suggests that aggregate poverty would fall fairly rapidly if moderate growth in average consumption levels can be sustained, and the poor share at least proportionally in that growth. However, it would take only small adverse shifts in the world distribution of consumption to eliminate the gains to the poor from growth.     

CRIME AND POVERTY: A SEARCH‐THEORETIC APPROACH*

Numerous studies document that criminal activity is positively related to unemployment and negatively related to educational attainment levels within given communities. We study this phenomenon in the context of a search‐equilibrium model, in which agents choose between formal employment and pursuing crime‐related activities (theft). Prior to their “occupational choices,” agents undertake costly schooling, raising their productivity. Crime acts, in essence, as a tax on human capital by affecting the probability that a worker's earnings (possessions) are subsequently appropriated. There are multiple equilibria. High crime, low levels of educational attainment, long spells of unemployment, and poverty are correlated across them.     

FOOD NEEDS AND ABSOLUTE POVERTY IN URBAN SOUTH AMERICA

The minimum cost of an adequate diet, following food preferences, is estimated for families in ten South American cities in five countries, allowing for household composition by age and sex. The ratio of actual expenditure on food and beverages to this normative expenditure is then used to rank families in six classes, of which the bottom two correspond to absolute poverty, or to actual expenditure less than the estimated minimum. Three questions can then be explored: which families appear to be poor, on this measure? how do such families allocate their spending toward other items such as housing? and, does this indicator of poverty classify families in much the same way as other proposed measures? The results suggest some under-reporting of food spending in the poorest class, but otherwise the ratio of reported to normative spending gives good results, free from the errors in other parts of the budget and the arbitrariness of indicators which depend on socially-defined rather than physiological “needs.” Poor families tend to be large, with many children; to have many dependents per income recipient; to have male working members other than the head; to suffer unemployment of members other than the head; to have relatively low levels of schooling; and to show high density in housing. Even quite poor households spend appreciable amounts on housing and on education, while not satisfying all food needs; both kinds of spending increase rapidly as food requirements are met. There are no consistent relations between poverty and type of employment or the share of income attributed to the head. The data refer to 1966–69 and are highly comparable; all monetary estimates are in dollars of equal purchasing power.     

ROLE OF RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE PERFORMANCE EVALUATIONS IN INTERGROUP COMPETITION

We investigate the moral hazard problem in which a principal delegates multiple tasks to multiple workers. The principal imperfectly monitors their action choices by observing the public signals that are correlated with each other through a macro shock. He divides the workers into two groups and makes them compete with each other. We show that when the number of tasks is sufficiently large, relative performance evaluation between the groups accompanied by absolute performance evaluation results in eliminating unwanted equilibria. In this case, any approximate Nash equilibrium nearly induces the first‐best allocation.     

RELATIVE INEQUALITY, ABSOLUTE INEQUALITY, AND WELFARE: LARGE SAMPLE TESTS FOR PARTIAL ORDERS

Two general welfare criteria, mean-relative Lorenz and mean-absolute Lorenz dominance, induce partial orders on income distributions. We propose asymptotically distribution-free inference procedures, based on the union-intersection principle, for these two welfare criteria. Unlike classical tests, our procedures allow one to distinguish among dominance, equality, and noncomparability. We show that union-intersection tests must be used to test for partial orders, and that the statistical ordering is acyclic. The tests are applied to compare the UK distribution of real family income to five other countries.     

RELATIVE POVERTY IN TWO EGALITARIAN SOCIETIES: A COMPARISON BETWEEN TAGANROG, RUSSIA DURING THE SOVIET ERA AND SWEDEN

Relative poverty in urban Russia at the end of the Soviet era (using microdata for the town of Taganrog) is compared to relative poverty in Sweden. The results indicate that the extent of relative poverty was rather similar in the two societies, but also that differences in the structure of poverty existed. In urban Russia characteristics of the household head leading to a high risk of poverty were advanced age, a limited education and being female. Swedish poverty was concentrated to households with a young head.     

MEASURING NEW ZEALAND'S GDP 1865–1933: A COINTEGRATION-BASED APPROACH

Official and semi-official estimates of New Zealand's national income are available on an annual basis for the years since 1932. Retrospective, non-official, estimates are available from 1859. Chiefly these are constructed following Doblin's (1951) pioneering use of money stock data, velocity, and the implications of the Quantity Theory of Money, and include the estimates of Hawke (1975), Rankin (1992) and Cashin (1995).
This paper estimates New Zealand real GDP per capita with monetary data using valid, intervention-free, cointegration methods. The new measures avoid the ad hoc adjustments found in Rankin (1992), yet unlike Cashin (1995), they incoporate specific New Zealand monetary features. The new time series conform well with independent benchmarks and the historiography of the pre-1914 period. Alternatively, they suggest an interpretation of New Zealand's growth experience for years around World War One which differs from that of Australia, and from the findings of Rankin (1992) and Cashin (1995).     

RELATIVE INEQUALITY AND POVERTY IN GERMANY AND THE UNITED STATES USING ALTERNATIVE EQUIVALENCE SCALES

We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study to show the sensitivity of measures of relative economic well-being of persons in the U.S. and Germany using official equivalence scales and consumption-based country-specific equivalence scales developed for the two countries. Overall inequality and poverty levels are found not to be sensitive to the equivalence scale used. However, the official German equivalence scale yields quite different results from the others with respect to the relative income and poverty levels of vulnerable groups within the population, especially older single people.     

转型期中等城市新城市贫困问题实证研究--以安徽省芜湖市为例

转型期出现的新城市贫困问题已经对我国城市的外向发展和内向发展产生了严重影响，而以传统产业和中小企业为主的中等城市是我国新城市贫困的高发地区。文章以安徽省芜湖市为例，利用普查和社会调查等第一手资料，分析了芜湖市新城市贫困的人口、社会和空间特征。发现新城市贫困人口具有人口同期群效应和结构性特征，空间分布出现贫困人口区位化趋势。探讨了新城市贫困的形成原因。认为体制转轨和制度创新不足是我国新城市贫困人口产生的主要原因，而转型期城市发展与管理存在的诸多问题以及贫困人口自身因素也导致了新城市贫困人口的产生。提出解决新城市贫困问题必须依靠深化社会和经济体制改革，在城市贫困的社会救助、扩大就业、规范劳动力市场、加强社区建设等多方面进行制度创新。     

A NEW MULTIPLICATIVE DECOMPOSITION FOR THE FOSTER–GREER–THORBECKE POVERTY INDICES

This paper shows that Foster–Greer–Thorbecke poverty indices can be written as the product of components summarizing the incidence, intensity and inequality dimensions of poverty and provides an empirical illustration of the decomposition using Spanish household budget surveys data.     

DETERMINING WHETHER DUMPED OR SUBSIDIZED IMPORTS INJURE DOMESTIC INDUSTRIES: INTERNATIONAL TRADE COMMISSION APPROACH

This paper examines the "traditional approach" that the US. International Trade Commission (ITC) has used during recent years to decide whether dumped or subsidized imports cause material injury to a domestic industry. ITC decisions are perceived as not explaining clearly why the conclusions reached follow from the facts presented. Using a survey of recent ITC decisions, the authors attempt to discover the assumptions and methods of analysis lying behind traditional analysis so that readers may more fully understand ITC opinions. The authors argue that the major components of the traditional approach are special applications of ordinary demand-supply analysis.     

A SYNTHESIS OF POVERTY LINE DEFINITIONS*

A fundamental point of discussion in poverty research is whether poverty is an absolute or a relative concept. If poverty is seen to be a situation of absolute deprivation, a poverty line will usually be defined to be independent of the general style of living in society. If poverty is considered to be a situation of relative deprivation, a poverty line will be defined in relation to the general style of living in society. The choice for one of these two approaches has important consequences for social policy, as absolute poverty may be reduced by economic growth, while relative poverty will only decrease when income inequality decreases. This paper suggests a poverty line definition that is not a priori meant to be either absolute or relative, but depends on the perception of poverty in society. If the poverty line is higher in countries with higher median income (as an indicator of “general style of living”) the poverty line is said to be relative; if the poverty line does not vary with median income, it is said to be absolute. The poverty line definition suggested appears to be a generalization of almost all well-known poverty line definitions. Poverty lines thus defined are estimated for eight European countries on the basis of a 1979 survey. The resulting lines appear to have an elasticity with respect to median income of 0.51, and hence can be said to be halfway on the scale between absolute and relative.     

A FEMINISATION OF POVERTY IN GREAT BRITAIN?

In most industrialised nations, women are over-represented in the ranks of the poor. Furthermore, it is often argued that this gender-based disadyantage has increased over time. In this paper the author tests this so-called "feminisation of poverty" hypothesis in Great Britain. Cross-sectional data from three years of the Family Expenditure Survey (1968, 1977 and 1986) are used. A poverty measure that is additively decomposable with population share weights, and is consistent with Sen's axiomatic approach to poverty measurement, is used to decompose the "total" amount of poverty into male and female "shares." Somewhat surprisingly, this decomposition lends no support to the feminisation of poverty hypothesis.     

我国的经济类型区和综合经济区划分新探

对于我国经济类型区的划分,提出以五分法(沿海区、近海内陆区、内陆核心区、深远内陆区、沿边区)来取代传统的东、中、西三分法,并根据五大类型区的区位条件,对其各自的发展前景和未来全国的地域分工格局提出了初步设想。在经济类型区“五分法”的基础上再通过合纵连横来划定综合经济区,把全国分为五大辐射圈(每个辐射圈都由辐射源和受辐射区两部分所组成)和四个独立辐射区。辐射圈和独立辐射区都是对综合经济区的表述形式。