Incomes in surveys suffer from various measurement problems, most notably in the tails of their distributions. We study the prevalence of negative and zero incomes, and their implications for inequality and poverty measurement relying on 57 harmonized surveys covering 12 countries over the...

A growing literature uses repeated cross-section surveys to derive 'synthetic panel' data estimates of poverty dynamics statistics. It builds on the pioneering study by Dang, Lanjouw, Luoto, and McKenzie (Journal of Development Economics, 2014) providing bounds estimates and the innovative...

The Greek crisis was the deepest and longest ever recorded in an OECD country in the postwar period. Output declined by over a quarter and disposable income by more than 40%, while the unemployment rate exceeded 27%. The paper explores the effects of the crisis on the level and the structure of...

The paper discusses the main issues related to negative and zero incomes that are relevant for the measurement of poverty. It shows the prevalence of non-positive incomes in high- and middle-income countries, provides an analysis of the sources and structure of these incomes, outlines the...

The key challenge in making distributional comparisons with ordinal data is the lack of commensurability of the distances between the ordered categories. This chapter provides a critical review of the most recent theoretical developments addressing this challenge and providing methods for...

Recent research on Nigeria indicates declining income inequality. In contrast, anecdotal evidence suggests that only the upper class has benefited from economic growth in Nigeria overtime. The disconnect between these findings and anecdotal evidence, and the limitation in how inequality was...

Panel data are rarely available for developing countries. Departing from traditional pseudo-panel methods that require multiple rounds of cross-sectional data to study poverty mobility at the cohort level, we develop a procedure that works with as few as two survey rounds and produces point...

This paper firstly aims to evaluate the incidence of measurement error affecting the main variables collected in surveys on consumption. The assessment is carried out on two Tanzania surveys which provide both diary and panel data. Diary data can be employed to obtain reliability coefficients...

This paper investigates greenhouse gas emissions convergence among twenty Latin American countries, for the period 1970 to 2015. To that end, we use the Phillips-Sul methodology to examine whether these countries have followed an absolute convergence process or, whether there has been a club...

The at-risk-of-poverty rate, the relative income poverty indicator applied in the EU, can be highly sensitive to the equivalence scale used to transform household income to an equivalent for individuals. This study applies two well-established approaches to estimate the equivalence scale: an...