It has been shown in prior research that increased economic growth reduces poverty. Authors have also found that the effect of growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on poverty growth has either diminished or remained unchanged over time, and economic expansion in the 1980s in the United States...

The Income Reference Period (IRP), the measurement period of income, differs across micro-economic databases of household or individual incomes; typically it is a year, a quarter (of a year) or a month. The length of the IRP affects the shape of the income distribution and derived distributional...

This article represents the first step in filling a large gap in knowledge concerning why Public Assistance (PA) use recently rose so fast in Japan. Specifically, we try to address this problem not only by performing a Blanchard and Quah decomposition on long-term monthly time series data...

Accounting for environmental damage is relevant to how one measures the extent and severity of inequality and poverty, and the question of ecological distribution - how the costs associated with environmental damage are distributed across the population - is critical. Following Khan’s (1997)...

Since the economic reforms of the early 1990s, the Indian economy witnessed a rapid rise in the mean income level, and, simultaneously, changes in the distribution of income. This study tries to capture how these changes affected poverty levels across major states in India. Total change in...

This article examines inequality and poverty among older people in Japan. It compares Japan with that of a sample of other OECD countries. Provisions within the social insurance system that enable old-age pensioners to work and draw incomes from labor explain some of the inequality and poverty...

The aim of this paper is to estimate non-monetary income advantages arising from publicly provided education and to analyze their impact on the income distribution and on economic inequality in Germany. Using representative micro-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and taking into...

This article discusses whether transition to retirement may be associated with a greater probability of becoming poor. Having recourse to the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) for Portugal, the analysis is focused on a sample of individuals who retired in the period 1994-2001....

A widely accepted criterion for the pro-poorness of an income growth pattern is that it should reduce a (chosen) measure of poverty by more than if all incomes were growing equi-proportionately. Inequality reduction is not generally seen as either necessary or sufficient for pro-poorness. As...

This article presents a simple non-polynomial spline that may be used to construct Lorenz curves from grouped data. The spline is naturally convex and works by determining a series of piecewise segments that may be joined to give a smooth and continuous Lorenz curve. The method is illustrated...