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 overcomes certain difficulties involved in the methods of Rodgers … & Rodgers (1993). The characteristics of the proposed Poverty-Stability-Index allow for an intuitive differentiation between the …

persistence of transitory shocks and their implications for the persistence of poverty and income inequality. The results suggest … poor individuals stayed in poverty for two years on average. In East Germany, the contribution of the permanent component … to overall income inequality increased from 20 percent in 1990 to over 70 percent in 1998 and the persistence of poverty …

We propose a framework for comparing the relationship between poverty and personal characteristics across countries (or … across years), and use it to compare levels and patterns of relative poverty in the USA, Great Britain and Germany during the … 1990s. The higher aggregate poverty rates in the USA and in Britain relative to Germany were mostly accounted for by higher …

Based on a multiple spells approach, this paper studies the extent and the composition of chronic poverty in Germany …. The results indicate that about one third of cross-sectional poverty in a given year is chronic. The characteristics that … are most closely associated with long-term poverty are economic inactivity and pensioner status, while the number of …