Two conversion schemes are usually employed for assessing personal-income inequality from household equivalent incomes: to weight household units by size or by needs.Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, we show the sensitivity of country inequality rankings to conversion schemes and...

Despite the formal rigour that attends social and economic measurement, the substantive meaning of particular measures could be compromised in the absence of a clear and coherent conceptualization of the phenomenon being measured. A case in point is afforded by the status of a "focus-axiom" in...

Two conversion schemes may be employed for assessing income inequality from household equivalent incomes: to weight household units by size or by needs. Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, we show the sensitivity of country inequality rankings to conversion schemes and explain the...

This paper proposes a new method of calculating the proportion of permanently impoverished persons among persons in poverty as a whole. The paper shows that the widely used Shorrocks-Index for decomposing permanent and transitory inequality can also be acquired to describe poverty. This method...

In view of rising wage and income inequality, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of a nationwide legal minimum wage of 7.50 € per hour on the basis of a microsimulation model which accounts...

Aphorisms that “rising tides raise all boats” or that material advances of the rich eventually “trickle down” to the poor are really maxims regarding the nature of stochastic processes that underlay the income/wellbeing paths of groups of individuals. This paper looks at the implications...

This paper examines three possible approaches to pro-poor growth. The first one assumes that the poverty line remains constant in real terms over time. The second perspective examines the case where the poverty line is equal to half the median of the income distribution but assumes that such a...

Using a sample of Europeans aged 50+ from twelve countries in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) we analyse the role of poor material conditions as a determinant of changes in health over a four-year period. We find that poverty defined with respect to relative incomes...

The most popular general univariate polarization indexes for discrete and continuous variables are extended and combined to describe the extent of polarization between agents in a distribution defined over a collection of many discrete and continuous agent characteristics. A formula for the...

Equivalence Scales are a tool for removing the heterogeneity of household sizes in the measurement of inequality, and affect poverty assessments and poverty lines. We address the disadvantage that poor households may suffer due to their reduced ability to share goods within the household. This...