THE EFFECT ON POVERTY STATUS IN ISRAEL OF CONSIDERING WEALTH AND VARIABILITY OF INCOME

This paper assesses the effects of including wealth and the variability of income on the incidence of poverty and the degree of income inequality in Israel. A special survey, which includes data on the wealth and income of a national sample of Israeli families in 1963–64 and 1964–65, allows us to go beyond measures based on current income alone.
The first section reviews earlier studies of poverty in Israel. The next section looks at poverty and inequality in terms of current income, current wealth, and a combined measure of income and wealth. The combined measure is the Hansen-Weisbrod measure (HW), which equals income plus the annuity value of wealth, assuming all wealth is just consumed at the time of death. It is interesting that, in spite of the much higher wealth inequality than income inequality, the HW measure was slightly more equally distributed than income. This result occurred because the annuity component made up a low share of the total HW measure and the correlation between income and wealth was well under 1. Although overall inequality and poverty were similar for income and HW measures, the incidence of poverty by subgroup depended on the measure used.
The final section presents a dynamic view of poverty and inequality. Year-to-year changes in poverty were substantial. Because of the use of a relative poverty concept and the rise in real incomes, the real income poverty line rose by 15 percent between 1963 and 1964. Still, of those in income poverty in 1963, 37 percent managed to escape poverty in 1964. The paper shows how the degree to which poverty was stable or transitory varied substantially by age and country of origin.     

ON MEASURING POVERTY

This paper investigates the properties of various measures of poverty and of the "difficulty of alleviation of poverty". It is found that the ranking properties of both kinds of indices can be quite counter-intuitive and that they could be misleading if used for policy evaluation. An alternative index is proposed; it is compared to the other indices and seems to fare rather well. To illustrate, a special reference is made to S. Anand's recent article on poverty in Malaysia.     

Production interdependencies and poverty reduction across ethnic groups in Malaysia

Production sectors are interdependent and the benefits of output growth for poverty reduction therefore spread over the economy. The role of such interdependencies is explicitly studied in this paper. A social accounting matrix for Malaysia that distinguishes between the major ethnic groups in Malaysia (Malays, Chinese, and Indians) is used to run the analyses. Interdependencies among production sectors are measured by splitting the total output effect into the initial, direct and indirect effects. The results show that sectors which have large (small) spillover effects are associated with lower (higher) poverty reduction. The best way to increase the income of poor workers in a sector, generally is to stimulate that sector rather than other sectors.     

A Simple Axiomatization of the Foster, Greer and Thorbecke Poverty Orderings

The paper presents a simple characterization of the poverty orderings which are represented by a poverty measure belonging to the Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke class. All properties introduced are formulated within an ordinal framework. Furthermore, a new concept is proposed: the equivalent societal income which—if given to each individual in society—yields the same level of poverty as the actual income distribution. It is a specific indicator of the underlying poverty ordering, has attractive properties and allows us to prove the main result in a direct way.     

AN ALTERNATIVE AXIOMATIZATION OF SEN'S POVERTY MEASURE

We provide an alternative axiomatization of Sen's (1976) poverty measure. We derive the measure from the general definition of a poverty measure by using a version of Sen's rank order axiom, and a substantially weaker form of his normalization axiom. These two axioms, together with a continuity axiom, lead uniquely to the measure suggested by Sen (1976).     

The probability of multidimensional poverty: A new approach and an empirical application to EU-SILC data

This paper proposes a novel method to analyze multidimensional poverty by using a large set of feasible weights to summarize the information about the poor, which enables remaining agnostic about the relative importance given to different poverty dimensions. This method allows for the calculation of the individual probability of being poor in a multidimensional perspective. The distribution of individual probabilities can then be combined with Generalized Lorenz dominance techniques to derive unanimous consent for a wide class of social welfare functions with a minimum load of value judgments. The innovations proposed here allow to move from a dual definition of poverty, where poor and non-poor individuals are classified in a mutually exclusive context, to a continuous measure of deprivation capturing both the extensive and intensive margin of multidimensional poverty. The empirical application of the method consists of measuring multidimensional poverty in ten selected countries using four waves of EU-SILC data (2008–2014).     

A new fuzzy unidimensional poverty index from an information theory perspective

This article proposes to use an information theory approach to design a fuzzy unidimensional poverty index. In order to avoid the usual binary definition of poverty, a fuzzy set approach has been used. The total population is partitioned into three mutually exclusive groups around the poverty line. This builds on fuzzy set theory whereby the definition of the threshold of who is poor or non-poor is fuzzy. This article proposes a method using a membership function and a confidence interval of poverty line to identify to what extent households can be considered as poor or non-poor. According to this membership function, a relative entropy measure is adopted to assess an aggregation method of fuzzy individual poverty. An application using individual well-being data from Tunisian households is presented.     

MEASUREMENT OF POVERTY: POLAND IN THE 1980s

This paper presents results of an examination of poverty in Poland in the 1980s. The individual welfare measure is expenditure on consumption per equivalent adult. Household equivalence scales are estimated using a quasi-exact scales trans logarithmic model. Four poverty indices are calculated. These are intended to capture the following aspects of poverty: (1) incidence, (2) relative deprivation, acid (3) social ability to eliminate poverty by income transfers. The study revealed significant changes in poverty during the investigated period, from 9 to 30 percent with persistent poverty resulting for pensioners, farmers and low educated persons.     

More Relatively‐Poor People in a Less Absolutely‐Poor World

Relative deprivation, shame, and social exclusion can matter to the welfare of people everywhere. The paper argues that such social effects on welfare call for a reconsideration of how we assess global poverty. We argue for using a weakly‐relative measure as the upper‐bound complement to the lower‐bound provided by a standard absolute measure. New estimates of poverty are presented. The absolute line is $1.25 a day at 2005 prices, while the relative line rises with the mean, at a gradient of 1:2 above $1.25 a day, consistently with national poverty lines. We find that the incidence of both absolute and weakly‐relative poverty in the developing world has been falling since the 1990s, but more slowly for the relative measure. While the number of absolutely poor has fallen, the number of relatively poor has changed little since the 1990s, and is higher in 2008 than 1981.     

Channels of redistribution: Inequality and poverty in the Russian transition

Contrary to popular perception, Russia entered the transition with significant inequality. Using the large Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey dataset, we demonstrate that inequality has subsequently risen yet further and by end-1996 was roughly comparable to inequality in Mexico, Colombia or Malaysia. Driving this increase has been not only wealth transfers through privatization but also changes in government expenditure and a sharp growth in earnings dispersion. There has been a large, associated shift in the structure of income. The paper also looks at the incidence and depth of poverty over the period 1992-96. At the start of transition, roughly half the population of households fell below the poverty line. While this has subsequently declined, at end-1996 nearly 40 per cent of households were below the poverty line and a substantial stratum of households were locked in chronic poverty.     

The "Inability to be Self-Reliant" as an Indicator of Poverty: Trends for the U.S., 1975–97

In this paper we present a new concept of poverty, Self-Reliant poverty, which is based on the ability of a family, using its own resources, to support a level of consumption in excess of needs. This concept closely parallels the "capability poverty" measure that has been proposed by Amartya Sen. We use this measure to examine the trend and composition of the Self-Reliant poor population from 1975 to 1997. We find that Self-Reliant poverty has increased more rapidly over this period than has official poverty. Families considered to be the most vulnerable—those headed by minorities, single women with children, and individuals with low levels of education—have the highest levels of Self-Reliant poverty. However, these groups have also experienced the smallest increases in poverty. Conversely, families largely thought to be economically secure—those headed by whites, married men with children, and highly educated individuals—have the lowest levels of Self-Reliant poverty, but have experienced the largest increases in poverty. We also find that the Self-Reliant poor is increasingly composed of vulnerable groups relative to the composition of the official poor. The labor market, demographic, and policy sources of the divergent trends in Self-Reliant and official poverty, and of the gender, race and family structure changes in poverty rates are explored.     

Equity-regarding poverty measures: differences in needs and the role of equivalence scales

Abstract .  The paper investigates the definition of equity-regarding poverty measures when there are different household types in the population. It demonstrates the implications of a between-type regressive transfer principle for poverty measures, for the choice of poverty lines, and for the measurement of living standard. The role of equivalence scales, which are popular in empirical work on poverty measurement, is clarified.     

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.     

Bivariate income distributions for assessing inequality and poverty under dependent samples

As indicators of social welfare, the incidence of inequality and poverty is of ongoing concern to policy makers and researchers alike. Of particular interest are the changes in inequality and poverty over time, which are typically assessed through the estimation of income distributions. From this, income inequality and poverty measures, along with their differences and standard errors, can be derived and compared. With panel data becoming more frequently used to make such comparisons, traditional methods which treat income distributions from different years independently and estimate them on a univariate basis, fail to capture the dependence inherent in a sample taken from a panel study. Consequently, parameter estimates are likely to be less efficient, and the standard errors for between-year differences in various inequality and poverty measures will be incorrect. This paper addresses the issue of sample dependence by suggesting a number of bivariate distributions, with Singh–Maddala or Dagum marginals, for a partially dependent sample of household income for two years. Specifically, the distributions considered are the bivariate Singh–Maddala distribution, proposed by Takahasi (1965), and bivariate distributions belonging to the copula class of multivariate distributions, which are an increasingly popular approach to modelling joint distributions. Each bivariate income distribution is estimated via full information maximum likelihood using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey for 2001 and 2005. Parameter estimates for each bivariate income distribution are used to obtain values for mean income and modal income, the Gini inequality coefficient and the headcount ratio poverty measure, along with their differences, enabling the assessment of changes in such measures over time. In addition, the standard errors of each summary measure and their differences, which are of particular interest in this analysis, are calculated using the delta method.     

How Should We Measure Poverty in a Changing World? Methodological Issues and Chinese Case Study

This study asks whether, in a rapidly changing world, the estimated proportion of the world's population with income below US$1 (adjusted according to purchasing power parity) per day is still a good measure of trends in poverty. It argues that strong economic growth in nations such as China implies that the commonly accepted international poverty line definition of one half median national equivalent income is increasingly relevant and that poverty intensity (the normalized deficit or Foster–Greer–Thorbecke (FGT) index of order one) is a better summary index. This index has a convenient graphical representation—the “poverty box”. Using the proposed poverty line and the example of ranking the level of rural poverty in Chinese provinces, the study demonstrates how poverty intensity replicates the poverty rankings of the Sen family of poverty indices and captures most of the information content of higher‐order FGT indices.     

When is growth pro-poor? Evidence from a panel of countries

Growth is pro-poor if the poverty measure of interest falls. According to this definition there are three potential sources of pro-poor growth: (a) a high growth rate of average incomes; (b) a high sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes; and (c) a poverty-reducing pattern of growth in relative incomes. I empirically decompose changes in poverty in a sample of developing countries during the 1980s and 1990s into these three components. In the medium- to long-run, most of the variation in changes in poverty can be attributed to growth in average incomes, suggesting that policies and institutions that promote broad-based growth should be central to the pro-poor growth agenda. Most of the remainder of the variation in changes in poverty is due to poverty-reducing patterns of growth in relative incomes, rather than differences in the sensitivity of poverty to growth in average incomes. Cross-country evidence provides relatively little guidance as to the policies and institutions that promote these other sources of pro-poor growth.     

Decomposing the contribution of migration to poverty reduction: methodology and application to Tanzania

In an economy with migration, poverty changes are composed of a number of forces, including the income gains and losses realized by the various migration streams. We present a simple but powerful decomposition methodology that uses panel data to measure the contributions of different migration streams to overall poverty change. An application to Tanzania shows the new insights that are provided – in particular on the role of migration to secondary towns in poverty reduction.     

NEW BUDGET STANDARD POVERTY LINES FOR MALAYSIA

In this paper, shortcomings of the official poverty line are examined. A new set of budget standard poverty lines were derived for various years between 1959 and 1981, by first estimating the food budget for Malaysian households. Then, an allowance for non-food items was obtained on the basis of the estimated food budget, and the relationship between the proportion of income allocated on food and non-food items, together yielding the poverty line. The results suggest that the official and other estimates of the poverty line income were generally higher, and thus have overestimated the extent of poverty in Malaysia.     

四省藏区多维贫困空间分异及基层能力建设

四省藏区作为我国深度贫困地区的重要组成部分是精准扶贫精准脱贫中后程的重点和难点。基于2014年采集的“十二五”期间全国“整村推进”项目村基础数据,借鉴A-F多维贫困测度方法,对四省藏区村域多维贫困状况进行测度分解,并基于拓展的能力视角探讨了村级组织能力禀赋对四省藏区村域多维贫困状况的差异化缓解作用。结果发现:除经济贫困之外,四省藏区还遭受基础教育和生产生活条件等维度的多维贫困,且存在空间异质性,云南和青海藏区是四省藏区中多维贫困问题最严重的区域;生活水平条件和村域发展资本维度对四省藏区的多维贫困指数贡献率最高;基层组织能力禀赋会显著影响四省藏区村域的多维贫困状况、缩小地区差距,在深度贫困地区更加显著。根据研究结论,从覆盖基础教育设施、改善生产生活条件、提高基层组织能力建设三方面为深度贫困地区脱贫攻坚提供政策参考。     

新疆南疆少数民族地区新农村建设的调查分析——以新疆和田地区墨玉县为例

全面建设社会主义新农村,是党中央重视加强“三农”工作的又一重大举措,也是各级党委政府工作的重点。新疆的南疆少数民族地区,经济发展水平相对较低,思想观念和科学文化水平相对落后,贫困发生率高,这些情况都决定了南疆少数民族地区的新农村建设不同于其它地区。本文以和田地区墨玉县为例,根据该县的实际情况,提出相应的对策。