1,721,006 research outputs found
A Path-Dependent Poverty Measure
No full textThe paper provides the axiomatic characterization of a new poverty measure, the path-dependent poverty index. This is a two period index taking into account not only individuals current and past deprivation levels, but also the relative position with respect to their previous income status. Given two populations with the same distribution of incomes, path-dependent poverty is higher for the population where all individuals experienced an income fall. Not only they are poor, they also feel the pain for their loss. The new index is illustrated with an application to EU countries
Vulnerability to Poverty
No full textThe literature on welfare analysis has recently started to take into account uncertainty and insecurity as essential dimensions of poverty, referring to this issue as Vulnerability (WDR 2000, p.12). There is still no agreement about vulnerability’s definition nor about ways of measuring it. In this work, we review the main contributions to vulnerability’s measurement in the existing literature and we try to underline strengths and shortfalls of the different approaches
Il debito pubblico in Italia e in Belgio
No full textNell’area Euro Italia e Belgio sono due paesi storicamente caratterizzati da un elevato debito pubblico in rapporto al Pil. Nel 1998, al termine degli aggiustamenti imposti dall’adesione al trattato di Maastricht, il rapporto debito prodotto era molto vicino, 117 in Belgio e 115 in Italia. Negli anni seguenti l’andamento di questo rapporto è stato profondamente diverso. In Italia nel periodo 1998-2006 la riduzione è stata modesta, solo 8 punti da 115 a 107; in Belgio, al contrario, la diminuzione è stata molto forte, 30 punti da 117 a 87.
Il lavoro analizza le ragioni di andamenti così diversi in paesi che appartengono alla stessa area economica e che devono seguire in buona misura politiche tendenzialmente coordinate dalla stessa autorità sovranazionale
Inequality, Privatization and Democratic Institutions in Developing Countries
No full textAccording to the existing theoretical literature there are several channels through
which privatization of State-owned enterprises and assets may shape the distribution
of income either increasing or decreasing the level of inequality. As a consequence,
assessing the actual distributional impact of privatization becomes an empirical mat-
ter. This paper is a rst attempt to empirically investigate the relationship between
privatization and income inequality focusing on the role of democratic institutions
in developing countries. Using an unbalanced panel of 80 countries in the period
1988-2008, we nd that privatization is negatively and signicantly correlated with
inequality when democratic institutions are well consolidated, and positively when
they are not. Our results, robust to dierent specications, measures of democ-
racy and economic controls, suggest an interesting and not yet investigated policy
implication for low or middle-income countries: only after having established ma-
ture representative political institutions, privatization appears to be related to a
reduction in income inequality
Bottom Incomes and the Measurement of Poverty
No full textThe chapter reviews and discusses the main issues related to negative and zero incomes that are relevant for the measurement of poverty. It shows the prevalence of non-positive incomes in high- and middle-income countries, provides an analysis of the sources and structure of these incomes, outlines the various approaches proposed by scholars and statistical agencies to treat non-positive incomes, and explains how non-positive incomes and alternative correction methods impact the measurement of standard poverty indexes. It is argued that negative and zero incomes cannot be treated equally in terms of household well-being and that standard methods used by practitioners fail to recognize this fact likely resulting in overestimations of poverty
Optimizing data-driven weights in multidimensional indexes
Full text linkMultidimensional indexes are ubiquitous, and popular, but present non negligible normative choices when it comes to attributing weights to their dimensions. This paper provides a more rigorous approach to the choice of weights by defining a set of desirable properties that weighting models should meet. It shows that Bayesian Networks is the only model across statistical, econometric, and machine learning computational models that meets these properties. An example with EU-SILC data illustrates this new approach highlighting its potential for policies
Bottom incomes and the measurement of poverty and inequality
No full textIncomes in surveys suffer from various measurement problems, most notably in the tails of their dis- tributions. We study the prevalence of negative and zero incomes, and their implications for inequality and poverty measurement relying on 57 harmonized data sets from the Luxembourg Income Study and Economic Research Forum databases, covering 12 Mediterranean countries over the period 1995– 2016. This paper explains the composition and sources of negative and zero incomes, and assesses the distributional impacts of alternative correction methods on poverty and inequality measures. It finds that the main source of negative disposable incomes is negative self-employment income, and that high tax, social security withholding, and high self-paid social security contributions account for negative incomes in some countries. Using detailed information on expenditure, we conclude that households with negative incomes are typically as well off as, or even better off than, other households in terms of material well-being. On the contrary, zero-income households are found to be materially deprived. Adjusting poverty and inequality measures for these findings can alter these measures significantly
Gini on Mutability
No full textIn 1912, Corrado Gini published a book in Italian entitled “Variabilità e Mutabilità” (Variability and Mutability). The first part of the book on Variability describes for the first time what became known as the Gini index for the measurement of inequality. Much less known is the second part of the book on Mutability—the study of measures of variability applied to qualitative series—most likely because the content of this part of the book was never published in English. This paper provides for the first time an abridged and commented translation of this second part of the book. We show that it amounts to a full treaty of Mutability measures predating the development of this literature by almost 40 years
- …
