Poverty and inequality are often estimated from grouped data as complete household surveys are neither always available to researchers nor easy to analyze. In this study we assess the performance of functional forms proposed by Kakwani (1980a) and Villasenor and Arnold(1989) to estimate the...

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 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...

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...

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...

We use the methodology developed in a previous study to individualise all incomes reported in the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (2006). Based on individual incomes we compute financial-dependency rates which are compared with the household-level at-risk-of-poverty...

This article carries out a validation exercise of vulnerability measures as predictors of poverty at the aggregate and micro levels based on short and long term panel data for Argentina and Chile. It then compares their performance to that of deprivation indicators. The main findings indicate...

This article analyzes the impact of risk on decisions made by the poor within the context of the Individual Development Account (IDA) program. IDA is a matched savings program designed to help low-income households invest in appreciating assets. For these households, the risk involved with...