The Luxembourg Income Study (now known as LIS) provides public access for research purposes to harmonized unit-record data sets for multiple countries, in addition to providing summary statistics from those data, including poverty and inequality measures. LIS is a well-managed and undeniably...

Measurements of standards of living and its distribution are affected by methodological choices made before the consumption and income aggregates are calculated and by failure to correct the primary databases, but several sources of bias can also have an impact. This study, based on surveys held...

The multitude of available poverty measures can confuse a policy maker who wants to evaluate a poverty-reduction policy. We proposes a rule for ranking poverty measures by use of the food-gap, calculated as the cost-difference between a household’s normative food basket, derived from a healthy...

Demographic disparities between the rates of occurrence of an adverse economic outcome can be observed to be increasing even as general social improvements supposedly lead towards the elimination of the adverse outcome in question. Scanlan (2006) noticed this tendency and developed a...

We review the recent empirical literature on global poverty, focusing on key methodological aspects. These include the choice of welfare indicator, poverty line and purchasing power parity exchange rates, equivalence scales, data sources, and estimation methods. We also discuss the importance of...

The paper provides an examination into the measures of multidimensional inequality proposed in the past few years, their properties and majorization criteria. It offers a generalisation of Bourguignon index proposed so that it includes Tsui measures (1999) while preserving the virtues of...

From 1992 to 2001, despite its rapid economic growth during the early 1990s, Argentina experienced a period characterized by increasing income inequality and poverty. An axiomatically modified Datt-Ravallion decomposition, that separates changes in poverty rates into mean and inequality...

The study of multidimensional deprivation has become one of the most relevant lines of research in the analysis of low-income households. The search for significant relationships between multidimensional deprivation and income poverty has been a central issue and most empirical studies have...

This paper argues that public holidays facilitate the co-ordination of leisure time but do not constrain the annual amount of leisure. Public holidays therefore have benefits both in the utility of leisure on holidays and (by enabling people to maintain social contacts more easily) in increasing...