MEASURING POVERTY USING BOTH INCOME AND WEALTH: A CROSS‐COUNTRY COMPARISON BETWEEN THE U.S. AND SPAIN

We study the correspondence between a household's income and its vulnerability to income shocks in two developed countries: the U.S. and Spain. Vulnerability is measured by the availability of wealth to smooth consumption in a multidimensional approach to poverty, which allows us to identify three groups of households: the twice‐poor group, which includes income‐poor households who lack an adequate stock of wealth; the group of protected‐poor households, which are all those income‐poor families with a buffer stock of wealth they can rely on; and the vulnerable‐non‐poor group, including households above the income‐poverty line that do not hold any stock of wealth. Interestingly, the risk of belonging to these groups changes over the life‐cycle in both countries while the size of the groups differs significantly between Spain and the U.S., although this result is quite sensitive to whether the housing wealth component is included in the wealth measure or not.     

Testing for poverty dominance: an application to Canada

Abstract The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across distributions. The tests, which can take into account the complex sampling procedures that are typically used by statistical agencies to generate household‐level surveys, are implemented using the Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) for 1996, 1999, and 2002. Although the yearly cumulative distribution functions cross at the lower tails of the distributions, the more recent years tend to dominate earlier years for a relatively wide range of poverty lines. Failing to take into account SLID’s sampling variability (as is sometimes done) can inflate significantly one’s confidence in ranking poverty. Taking into account SLID’s complex sampling design (as has not been done before) can also decrease substantially the range of poverty lines over which a poverty ranking can be inferred.     

Chronic and transient poverty: Measurement and estimation, with evidence from China

The paper contributes to the measurement of poverty and vulnerability in three ways. First, it proposes a new approach to separating poverty into chronic and transient components. Second, it provides corrections for the statistical biases introduced when using a small number of periods to estimate the importance of vulnerability and transient poverty. Third, it applies these tools to the measurement of chronic and transient poverty in China using a rich panel data set that extends over 17 years. Alternative measurement techniques are found to yield significantly different estimates of the relative importance of chronic and transient poverty. The precision of the estimates is also considerably enhanced by simple statistical corrections.     

The measurement of income mobility: A partial ordering approach

Summary. Given a set of longitudinal data pertaining to two populations, a question of interest is the following: Which population has experienced a greater extent of income mobility? The aim of the present paper is to develop a systematic way of answering this question. We first put forth four axioms for income movement-mobility indices, and show that a familiar class of measures is characterized by these axioms. An unambiguous (partial) ordering is then defined as the intersection of the (complete) orderings induced by the mobility measures which belong to the characterized class; a transformation of income distributions is “more mobile” than another if, and only if, the former is ranked higher than the latter for all mobility measures which satisfy our axioms. Unfortunately, our mobility ordering depends on a parameter, and therefore, it is not readily apparent how one can apply it to panel data directly. In the second part of the paper, therefore, we derive several sets of parameter-free necessary and sufficient conditions which allow one to use the proposed mobility ordering in making unambiguous income mobility comparisons in practice. Received: July 12, 1995; revised version: May 13, 1997     

Decomposing Vulnerability to Poverty

This paper applies the decomposition of the Foster–Greer–Thorbecke poverty index to the measurement of individual vulnerability to poverty. I highlight that poverty risk can be expressed as a function of expected incidence, expected intensity, and expected variability below the poverty line, three essential aspects for improving the design of appropriate risk‐management policies. An empirical illustration is provided using the British Household Panel Survey and the Italian Survey on Household Income and Wealth.     

The measurement of rank mobility

In this paper we investigate the problem of measuring social mobility when the social status of individuals is given by their rank. In order to sensibly represent the rank mobility of subgroups within a given society, we address the problem in terms of partial permutation matrices which include standard (“global”) matrices as a special case. We first provide a characterization of a partial ordering on partial matrices which, in the standard case of global matrices, coincides with the well-known “concordance” ordering. We then provide a characterization of an index of rank mobility based on partial matrices and show that, in the standard case of comparing global matrices, it is equivalent to Spearman's ρ index.     

Decomposing poverty changes into vertical and horizontal components

Variations in aggregate poverty indices can be due to differences in average poverty intensity, to changes in the welfare distances between those poor of initially unequal welfare status and/or to emerging disparities in welfare among those poor of initially similar welfare status. This note uses a general cost‐of‐inequality approach that decomposes the total change in poverty into a sum of indices of each of these three components. This decomposition can serve inter alia to integrate horizontal and vertical equity criteria in the poverty alleviation assessment of social and economic programmes. The use of these measures is briefly illustrated using Tunisian data.     

Unit-Consistent Poverty Indices

This paper characterizes unit-consistent poverty indices. The unit consistency axiom requires that poverty rankings (not poverty indices) remain unaffected when all incomes and the poverty lines are expressed in different measuring units. We consider two general frameworks of poverty measurement: the semi-individualistic framework that includes all decomposable indices and all rank-based indices; and the Dalton–Hagenaars framework that contains a subset of decomposable indices. Within the semi-individualistic framework, classes of unit-consistent poverty indices can be characterized for different value judgements about poverty measurement. Within the Dalton-Hagenaars framework, unit-consistent poverty indices are completely characterized without invoking any value judgement a priori. I thank Peter Lambert, Mike Hoy, Thesia Garner and an anonymous referee for their very helpful comments and suggestions.     

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.     

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.     

Ranking investment projects

Summary. This paper describes conditions under which one investment project dominates a second project in terms of net present value, irrespective of the choice of the discount rate. The resulting partial ordering of projects has certain similarities to stochastic dominance. However, the structure of the net present value function leads to characterizations that are quite specific to this context. Our theorems use Bernstein's (1915) innovative results on the representation and approximation of polynomials, as well as other general results from the theory of equations, to characterize the partial ordering. We also show how the ranking is altered when the range of discount rates is limited or the rate varies period by period. Received: January 5, 2002; revised version: October 29, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" We thank Robert Driskill, Andrea Maneschi, Roy Radner, and participants of seminars at NYU, Notre Dame, Purdue, and Washington University for helpful comments. The present version of the paper has benefited from comments by a referee and the editor. Foster is grateful for support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation through its network on Inequality and Poverty in Broader Perspective. Correspondence to: T. Mitra     

MEASURING POVERTY ACCOUNTING FOR TIME

In this paper we make a methodological proposal to measure poverty accounting for time by proposing a new family of intertemporal poverty indexes that aims at reconciling the way poverty is measured in a static and a dynamic framework. Our index is able to consider the duration of the poverty spell and the social preference for equality in well‐being given that, in contrast with others that have been previously proposed, it is sensitive to the level of inequality between individual complete poverty experiences over time. Moreover, other indices in the literature can be interpreted as special cases of our more general measure. An empirical illustration shows the relevance of considering the distribution of poverty experiences among the population in an international analysis.     

中国老年家庭的经济脆弱性与贫困

利用中国健康与营养调查(CHNS)2006和2009年的面板数据测度了老年家庭的经济脆弱性,检验各因素对经济脆弱性和贫困的相对影响力。老年家庭的经济脆弱性高于贫困;户主特征和家庭变量不同程度地影响到了经济脆弱性及贫困,代际间向上流动的私人转移支付对老年家庭的经济脆弱性和贫困没有作用;超过24%的非贫困家庭是经济脆弱性家庭;期望效用的脆弱性(VEU)方法表明,不平等虽然减少了脆弱性,但其影响经济脆弱性的力量最小,不可解释的风险是最重要的因素,异质性风险和协同性风险的力量居中。     

A Consistent Poverty Approach to Assessing the Sensitivity of Income Poverty Measures and Trends

This paper examines the sensitivity of estimates of income poverty rates and trends to variations in the poverty line and to whether or not certain households are included or excluded from the sample used to estimate poverty. The approach draws on the concept of consistent poverty, which has been used to identify those with incomes below the poverty line who also experience deprivation. Our approach involves excluding households with incomes below the poverty line if they report zero or negative income or are self‐employed, have expenditure well in excess of their income, have substantial wealth holdings, or if they do not report having experienced financial stress over the past year. The combined impact of all four exclusions is to reduce the half‐median income poverty rate from 9.9 per cent to 5.4 per cent, but also suggests that poverty increased by more over the decade to 2003–04 than the original estimates indicate.     

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.     

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.     

Testing Prediction Performance of Poverty Models: Empirical Evidence from Uganda

This paper examines the performance of a method of predicting poverty rates. Because most developing countries cannot justify the expense of frequent household budget surveys, additional low‐cost methods have been developed and used. The prediction method is based on a model linking the proportion of poor households to suitable explanatory variables (consumption proxies). These consumption proxies are variables that can be collected at much lower cost through smaller annual surveys. Several applications have shown that such models can produce poverty estimates with confidence intervals of a similar magnitude to the poverty estimates from the household budget surveys. There is, however, limited evidence of how well the methods perform out‐of‐sample. A series of seven household budget surveys conducted in Uganda in the period 1993–2005 allows us to test the prediction performance of the model. We test the poverty models by using data from one survey to predict the proportion of poor households in other surveys, and vice versa. The results are encouraging, as all models predict similar poverty trends. Although in most cases the predictions are precise, sometimes they differ significantly from the poverty level estimated from the survey directly.     

MEASURING NON‐ECONOMIC WELL‐BEING ACHIEVEMENT

Income per capita and most widely reported, non‐ or non‐exclusively income based human well‐being indicators are highly correlated among countries. Yet many countries exhibit higher achievement in the latter than predicted by the former. The reverse is true for many other countries. This paper commences by extracting the inter‐country variation in a composite of various widely‐reported, non‐income‐based well‐being indices not accounted for by variations in income pre capita. This extraction is interpreted inter alia as a measure of non‐economic well‐being. The paper then looks at correlations between this extraction and a number of new or less widely‐used well‐being measures, in an attempt to find the measure that best captures these achievements. A number of indicators are examined, including measures of poverty, inequality, health status, education status, gender bias, empowerment, governance and subjective well‐being.     

IS ECONOMIC GROWTH IN COTE D'IVOIRE PRO‐POOR? EVIDENCE FROM LSMS DATA: A NOTE

This paper analyses the impact of the economic growth in Cote d'Ivoire on the poor people. We use household data from two LSMS (1992 and 2002) led by the National Statistical Office of Côte d'Ivoire. We show that the situation in this country is characterized by a trickle‐down growth: the poverty growth curve and the growth incidence curve computed show that growth reduces poverty but the poor people receive proportionally fewer benefits than the non‐poor.     

Viewpoint: Measuring the well‐being of the poor with income or consumption: a Canadian perspective

Abstract There is a long tradition of using consumption measures derived from Statistics Canada's household expenditures surveys to study material well‐being, inequality, and poverty. We offer an introduction to this research. Income and consumption measures give different pictures of the patterns of material well‐being in Canada, but the differences are not as large as in the US. We also provide a comparison to Meyer and Sullivan's results on data quality. Canadian expenditure surveys are of high quality. Unique aspects of these surveys (variation in quality control measures over time and the possibility of comparing to income tax data) provide important insights into the quality of survey data on income and consumption.