A SHAPLEY DECOMPOSITION OF MULTIDIMENSIONAL CHRONIC POVERTY IN ARGENTINA

This paper proposes a Shapley decomposition to analyse the evolution of chronic poverty in a multivariate setting using a chronic poverty measure proposed by Alkire and colleagues. The decomposition makes possible to assess a vast array of information to find the drivers of change in chronic poverty, and could be a valuable tool in the way public policy programmes focus resources. We present an empirical application of the changes in chronic poverty in Argentina during the period 2004–12 using the Permanent Household Survey. We found that households with older adults show great persistence of multidimensional chronic poverty in time while the employment indicators is found to be an important driver of the intensity of chronic poverty.     

Contributions of Longitudinal Data to Poverty Measurement in Australia*

Chronic poverty is of greater social consequence than transitory poverty but its measurement requires longitudinal data. This article uses six waves of data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey to explore the extent to which longitudinal data contribute to what is known about poverty from cross‐section data. We find an imperfect correspondence between people’s annual poverty status and chronic poverty status. Consequently, policies that aim to reduce chronic poverty using means‐tested benefits may be partially misdirected if beneficiaries are identified using annual income. Furthermore, some households experiencing chronic poverty may fall through the safety net.     

The Hunger of Old Women in Rural Tanzania: Can Subjective Data Improve Poverty Measurement?

On average, women in Tanzania are slightly less likely than men to say that they are “always/often without enough food to eat”—but this masks a much higher rate of self‐reported food deprivation among elderly rural women. Official Tanzanian poverty statistics are, however, based on a methodology which presumes equal sharing per equivalent adult within the household. This paper combines subjective and objective micro‐data from Tanzania's 2007 Household Budget Survey and 2007 Views of the People Survey. By imputing individual consumption based on the relative probability of self‐reported food deprivation, it provides an example of the possible importance of one type of intra‐household inequality—i.e., the hunger of old women—for poverty measurement. Implications include the complexity of gendered intra‐household inequality and the importance of “technical” poverty measurement choices for public policy priorities, such as old age pensions.     

The impact of natural disasters on household income,expenditure, poverty and inequality: evidence from Vietnam

Natural disasters are expected exacerbate poverty and inequality, but little evidence exists to support the impact at household level. This article examines the effect of natural disasters on household income, expenditure, poverty and inequality using the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey in 2008. The effects of a natural disaster on household income and expenditure, corrected for fixed effects and potential endogeneity bias, are estimated at 6.9% and 7.1% declines in Vietnamese household per capita income and expenditure, respectively. Natural disasters demonstrably worsen expenditure poverty and inequality in Vietnam, and thus should be considered as a factor in designing poverty alleviation policies.     

Impact of education and health on poverty reduction: Monetary and non-monetary evidence from Fiji

Fiji signed the United Nations 2015 target of halving extreme poverty from its 1990 level, but like many developing countries it is facing challenges in meeting this goal. This paper presents the economic modelling using Fiji's Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2002/03 dataset to examine the economic and social factors crucial for poverty reduction. Two hypotheses are tested: first, we estimate the monetary effects of education at the aggregate and disaggregated returns to education (primary, secondary, tertiary levels) and by income quartiles, and second, test the non-monetary education and health factors as channels of impact promulgated as effects against poverty prevalence. The monetary results indicate that all income quartile households (i.e. lowest to highest) benefit from additional skills obtained through formal education. While those at the lowest income quartile in particular benefit the most from formal education, however it cannot sustainably prevent people with only primary education from falling into poverty. The results for non-monetary models show that education has a positive and significant influence on the tendency of the people to engage in health prevention activities and in acquiring good housing facilities.     

MEASURING SUB‐NATIONAL INCOME POVERTY BY USING A SMALL AREA MULTIVARIATE APPROACH

The present paper proposes a statistical strategy for the analysis of regional disparities in income poverty. For the EU countries, information on individual income has been collected until now by the European Community Household Panel survey, which only yields reliable estimates for very large regions within countries. In order to obtain reliable estimates for some of the poverty indicators suggested by the Laeken Council at the sub‐national level, we suggest the adoption of a multivariate small area estimation approach which enables us to reduce estimate variability. We concentrate on Italy, the country with the lowest degree of regional cohesion within the EU. Results show that disparity cannot be reduced to the so‐called “North–South divide,” with the “poor” South separated from the “affluent” North, as both these macro‐regions display large internal differences in terms of both poverty level and income inequality. The strategy we propose could also be adopted in order to measure poverty in other European regions, using information produced by the new EU Survey on Income and Living Conditions, which is replacing the European Community Household Panel.     

POVERTY EQUIVALENT GROWTH RATE

This paper proposes a new type of growth rate, called the “poverty equivalent growth rate” (PEGR), which takes into account both the growth rate in mean income and how the benefits of growth are distributed between the poor and the non‐poor. The proposed measure satisfies a basic requirement that the proportional reduction in poverty is a monotonically increasing function of the PEGR. Thus, maximizing the PEGR implies a maximum reduction in poverty. The paper demonstrates that the magnitude of PEGR determines the pattern of growth: whether growth is pro‐poor in relative or absolute sense or is “poverty reducing” pro‐poor. The pattern of growth has been analyzed for Brazil using the National Household Survey (PNAD) covering the period 1995–2005.     

Vulnerability Orderings for Expected Poverty Indices

Vulnerability to poverty refers to the risk of an individual or household falling below the poverty line. A partial vulnerability to poverty ordering is defined to indicate when a situation characterized by uncertainty means that people are more vulnerable to poverty than in another situation. The family of expected poverty indices used in this context contains versions under vulnerability of many well‐known poverty indices. The ordering resembles the Hardy et al. result on the Lorenz partial ordering. A separate ordering for the expected income gap ratio is also investigated. First‐order stochastic dominance is used to indicate when the expected value of the censored returns from the states increases.     

Poverty projection using a small area estimation method: Evidence from Vietnam

For poverty monitoring and evaluation, one needs poverty estimates at the different disaggregation levels. The prediction of poverty trend is also of interest for policy makers as well as researchers. This paper presents a method – that is based on a small area estimation method of Elbers et al. (2003) – to project a map of disaggregated poverty measures in the future. This method is applied to project a poverty map in rural Vietnam for the year 2008 using the 2006 Rural, Agricultural and Fishery Census and the 2004 and 2006 Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys.     

Geographies of injustice: the socio-spatial determinants of energy poverty in Poland,the Czech Republic and Hungary

Falling real incomes, rising utility prices and the historically poor thermal quality of the housing stock are some of the main factors that have driven the rise of systemic injustices surrounding energy poverty in the post-communist states of Eastern and Central Europe (ECE). We undertake a socio-spatial and temporal assessment of energy poverty in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, using Household Budget Survey micro-data and the consolidated national results of the EU Survey of Income and Living Conditions. Our results indicate that increases in domestic energy prices and expenditures during the last decade have not been offset by purchasing power gains or energy efficiency improvements, resulting in sustained and growing levels of energy poverty. Capital city regions have fared better than rural areas even if traditional macroeconomic performance indicators do not easily match domestic energy deprivation metrics. We thus question policy approaches that favour income-based solutions and fail to recognise housing- and demography-related vulnerabilities.     

金融能力、金融决策与贫困

本文利用2013年中国家庭金融调查（CHFS）数据,通过因子分析法构建居民金融能力指数,运用Probit模型、工具变量法和中介效应模型实证分析了金融能力对贫困的影响以及金融能力、金融决策与贫困之间的作用机理。研究发现：（1）无论是绝对贫困还是相对贫困,金融能力能够显著抑制贫困的发生,且城镇地区相较农村地区更明显。（2）金融能力对贫困的影响既存在“抑制效应”,也存在“偏离效应”,两者之间呈现正“U”型关系。（3）经中介效应模型计算可知,在“抑制效应”下,金融能力可以通过改善金融决策来缓解居民贫困状况。具体而言,在三种不同的贫困状况衡量方式下,金融决策的中介效应占比分别为2542%,2296%和2160%。     

Vulnerability and poverty dynamics in Vietnam

Drawing upon the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) data that cover the whole of Vietnam in 2002 and 2004, ex ante measures of vulnerability are constructed. These are then compared with static indicators of poverty (i.e. the headcount ratio in a particular year). Detailed analyses of the panel data show that (i) in general, vulnerability in 2002 translates into poverty in 2004; (ii) vulnerability of the poor tends to perpetuate their poverty and (iii) sections of the nonpoor but vulnerable slip into poverty. Durable reduction in poverty is conditional on (i) accurate identification of the vulnerable, (ii) their sources of vulnerability and (iii) design of social safety nets that would enable the vulnerable to reduce risks and cope better with rapid integration of markets with the larger global economy.     

CAN HOUSEHOLDS AND WELFARE STATES MITIGATE RISING EARNINGS INSTABILITY?

We compare the evolution of earnings instability in Germany and the United Kingdom, two countries which stand for different types of welfare states. Deploying data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel (SOEP) and the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), we estimate permanent and transitory variances of male income over the period 1984–2009 and 1991–2006, respectively. Studies in this literature generally use individual labor earnings. To uncover the role of welfare state and households in smoothening earnings shocks, we compute different income concepts ranging from gross earnings to net equivalent household income. We find evidence that the overall inequality of earnings in Germany and the United Kingdom has been rising throughout the period due to both higher permanent earnings inequality and higher earnings volatility. However, taking institutions of the welfare state and risk‐sharing households into account, we find that the volatility of net household income has remained fairly stable. Furthermore, redistribution and risk insurance provided by the welfare state is more pronounced in Germany than in the United Kingdom.     

Can microcredit reduce vulnerability to poverty? Evidence from rural Vietnam

Extant literature has extensively explored microcredit's impacts, confirming its essential role in poverty alleviation. However, most studies focus on poverty measures that exclusively emphasize current poverty status without adequately addressing the potential of falling into or remaining in poverty. Furthermore, the role of credit services in helping the poor in rural areas appears to be underexamined in the literature. To address this knowledge gap, this study investigates whether rural microcredit can reduce household vulnerability to poverty. A theoretical framework is developed to capture the mechanism by which microcredit borrowing has a vital role in household businesses and impacts the probability of being poor in the future. The Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey data set from 2008 to 2016 is used to explore this issue. The findings indicate that rural Vietnam's access to microcredit significantly reduces vulnerability to poverty. Moreover, better-off households are seemingly the most effective at using microcredit, whereas the opposite is found among worse-off households. These results are found to be robust using the propensity score matching method.     

Switching the lights off: The impact of energy tariff increases on households in the Kyrgyz Republic

This paper describes an analysis of the impact that higher energy tariffs would have on households in the Kyrgyz Republic using micro-data from the 2009 Kyrgyz Integrated Household Survey. This analysis was conducted to determine which households would be most affected by higher energy tariffs and to what extent mitigation measures, such as lifeline tariffs or direct cash transfers, might lessen the impact for poor and vulnerable households. The analysis focused on first-order effects and used benefit incidence analysis and static micro-simulation to estimate the expected costs and benefits of higher energy prices and the corresponding mitigation measures. The results suggest that both the type of energy and the level of connectedness matter. Increasing tariffs for thermal power used for central heating and hot water mainly affects richer households in urban areas. Reducing implicit electricity subsidies affects the entire population due to nearly complete country coverage with electricity connections. Both lifeline tariffs and direct cash transfers could mitigate the effect of higher electricity tariffs at lower costs than universal subsidies.     

Persistent and Consistent Poverty in the 1994 and 1995 Waves of the European Community Household Panel Survey

This paper focuses on the mismatch between income and deprivation measures of poverty. Using the first two waves of the European Community Household Panel Survey, a measure of relative deprivation is constructed and the overlap between the relative income poor and relatively deprived is examined. There is very limited overlap with the lowest relative income threshold. The overlap increases as the income threshold is raised, but it remains true that less than half those below the 60 percent relative income line are among the most deprived. Relative deprivation is shown to be related to the persistence of income poverty, but also to a range of other resource and need factors. Income and deprivation measures each contain information that can profitably be employed to enhance our understanding of poverty and a range of other social phenomena. This is illustrated by the manner in which both income poverty and relative deprivation are associated with self-reported difficulty making ends meet.     

Robust Poverty and Inequality Measurement in Egypt: Correcting for Spatial-price Variation and Sample Design Effects

The paper estimates inequality and absolute poverty in Egypt for 1997 with measures that are robust to sample design effects and corrected for spatial variation in price levels. Standard errors for inequality indices are calculated using a bootstrap approach which replicates the sample design. Standard errors for poverty indices are corrected for the design effects resulting from sample stratification and clustering. The authors use data from the Egypt Integrated Household Survey and follow the cost‐of‐basic‐needs methodology to construct region‐specific poverty lines. It is found that 15.7 million people were poor in Egypt in 1997, or 26.5% of the population. The estimates indicate a sharp sectoral difference with rural areas being significantly poorer, but significant differences in poverty were not found between Upper and Lower Egypt. This finding differs substantially from the conventional wisdom that Upper Egypt is poorer than Lower Egypt and results from the correction for spatial‐price variation.     

The Distribution of Household Health Expenditures in Australia*

Out‐of‐pocket health expenditures in Australia are high in international comparisons and have been growing at a faster rate than most other health costs in recent years. This raises concerns about the extent to which out‐of‐pocket costs have constrained access to health services for low income households. Using data from the ABS Household Expenditure Survey 2003–2004, we model the relationships between health expenditure shares and equivalised total expenditure for categories of out‐of‐pocket health expenditures and analyse the extent of protection given by concession cards. To allow for flexibility in the relationship we adopt Yatchew's semi‐parametric estimation technique. This is the first detailed distributional analysis of household health expenditures in Australia. We find mixed evidence for the protection health concession cards give against high out‐of‐pocket health expenditures. Despite higher levels of subsidy, households with concession cards do not have lower out‐of‐pocket expenditures than non‐cardholder households except for the highest expenditure quintile. Cards provide most protection for GP out‐of‐pocket expenditures.     

The impact of work and non‐work migration on household welfare,poverty and inequality

This article estimates the impact of work migration and non‐work migration on per capita income, per capita expenditures, poverty and inequality in Vietnam using data from the two most recent Vietnam Household and Living Standard Surveys. We find that both work migration and non‐work migration have a positive impact on per capita expenditures of migrant‐sending households. Non‐work migration significantly decreases the incidence, depth and severity of national poverty. The effect of work migration on poverty is much smaller. Still, while work migration does not lift people out of poverty, it makes their poverty less severe. In addition, both work migration and non‐work migration decrease inequality, albeit only very slightly.     

Poverty,undernutrition and vulnerability in rural India: role of rural public works and food for work programmes

This paper analyses the effects of access to Rural Public Works (RPW) or Food for Work programme (FFW) on consumption poverty, vulnerability and undernutrition in India using the large household data sets constructed by the National Sample Survey for 1993 and 2004. The treatment-effects model is used to take account of sample selection bias in evaluating the effects of RPW in 1993 or FFW in 2004 on poverty. We have found significant and negative effects of participation in RPW and the Food for Work Programme on poverty, undernutrition (e.g. protein) and vulnerability in 1993 and 2004.