Abstract: The living standard of the least well-off members of society ‐ industrialized or not ‐ is of public policy and ethical interest. One way to examine differences between societies in this respect is to study the extent and severity of income poverty between countries and over time. While poverty can be thought of in many different ways, examining income poverty has a long tradition. This chapter reviews issues that arise in studying economic poverty in industrialized countries and examines evidence on their ranking according to poverty and its changes over time. We review conceptual issues in Section 2. We discuss the measurement of resources, comparisons between different types of units, and what kinds of comparisons between different populations can be made. We also discuss the role of time, income sharing assumptions and the aggregation of poverty information. In Section 3, we discuss domestic evidence on poverty before turning to evidence drawn from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) on the incidence of relative poverty and its evolution over time. We then examine poverty orderings of countries using dominance criteria, studying the ordering by increasingly demanding conditions, and using both the poverty standard of each country and a common poverty line for all countries. We then move to examine in Section 4 the ordering of countries, using similar methods, for selected demographic subgroups of the population: children, the elderly and persons living in female-headed households. In Section 5 we examine briefly the role of the public sector in terms of differences between market income and disposable income poverty rates, measured using the LIS. In Section 6 we examine longitudinal evidence on poverty, show some crossnational evidence on the patterns of intragenerational poverty mobility and persisDraft of Chapter 10 in Handbook on Income Distribution , edited by A.B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon.
Publication Year: 1999
Publication Date: 1999-01-01
Language: en
Type: preprint
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Cited By Count: 130
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