Pauvreté et mortalité différentielle chez les personnes âgées

This paper aims at illustrating, in the case of Belgian regions, a specific problem faced by poverty measures. Since mortality is related to the level of income ? poor persons tend to die, on average, at younger ages than non-poor persons ? poverty measures for the elderly depend not only on what one can call the ?true poverty?, but, also, on the selection induced by differential mortality due to income inequality. By computing the hypothetical poverty rates that would prevail if all persons (of all income levels) had the same life expectancy, we estimate new poverty measures, which, by construction, neutralize the interference or the noise due to income-based differential mortality. Such an adjustment of poverty measures is particularly relevant for the case of Belgium, where mortality gaps between Flemish and Walloon, as well as between rich and poor, are sizeable. JEL code: I32