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...

In view of rising poverty rates, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of a nationwide minimum wage of 7.50e per hour based on a micro-simulation model accounting for interactions between wages, the...

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...

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...

The dearth of studies on quantitative determinants of poverty in Nigeria is a major weak point in the country’s poverty reduction policy and strategy formulation. A recent study in Kogi State of Nigeria revealed that poverty is higher among households that have male heads, are polygamous, have...

Argentina constitutes an interesting case to be analyzed because during the 1990s, it achieved high rates of growth jointly with significant increases in unemployment and poverty. This document studies the dynamics of Argentine poverty between 1991 and 2003, analyzing the impact of different...

This article conceives poverty in terms of the consumption of essential food, makes use of a new deprivation (or poverty) function, and examines the effects of changes in the mean and the variance of the income distribution on poverty, assuming a log-normal income distribution. The presence of a...

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...