This study provides evidence on the trends and drivers of inequality in Vietnam using Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys. We find that inequality, regardless of the choice of welfare indicators and inequality measurements, has been stable in Vietnam. Inequality in income or expenditure is...

We examine whether having a parent who smoked during one's childhood or adolescence increases the probability of being in energy poverty in adulthood. We find that people who had a parent who smoked when they were young are 0.8 to 1.4 percentage points more likely to be in energy poverty later...

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...

Although many studies point to the significant influence of collective bargaining institutions on earnings inequalities, evidence on how these institutions shape poverty rates across developed economies remains surprisingly scarce. It would be a mistake, though, to believe that the relationship...

Evidence suggests that household responses to price and income changes are significantly sensitive across income levels and rural-urban location. In this paper, we focus on poor households vs. non-poor households using two definitions of poverty, objective and subjective. We evaluate the...

When developing anti-poverty policies, policymakers need accurate data on theprevalence of poverty. In this paper, we focus on subjective poverty, a conceptwhich has been largely neglected in literature, yet remains a conceptually appeal-ing way to define poverty. The primary goal of this study...

Estimates of average per capita consumption and income from national accounts differ substantially from corresponding measures of consumption and income from household surveys. Using a new compilation of more than 2,000 household surveys matched to national accounts data, we find that the gaps...

When developing anti-poverty policies, policymakers need accurate data on the prevalence of poverty. In this paper, we focus on subjective poverty, a concept which has been largely neglected in the literature, though it remains a conceptually appealing way to define poverty. The primary goal of...

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...

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...