We examine the extent to which food insecurity questions and the standard poverty measure are correlated with various dietary and physiologic outcomes. Our findings suggest that the correlations vary tremendously by age. We find that the food insecurity questions are correlated with the dietary...

In this paper we describe and explain country differences in the effect of gender on the risk to become poor, using data from the Luxembourg Income Study on 22 industrialized countries. Although in most countries women are more likely to become poor than men, this is not the case for all...

This paper assesses women's poverty in 26 diverse LIS countries - five Anglophone countries, six Continental European countries, four Nordic countries, two Eastern European countries, three Southern European countries, and six Latin American countries. Our analyses are organized around four...

Social vulnerability due to insufficient income and earnings may come from many sources, both demographic and economic, in a globalizing world. This paper examines the problems of population aging, low wages, growing inequality, and insufficient social spending. Vulnerable groups such as...

Caloric intake and minimum calorie thresholds are widely used in developing countries to assess hunger and nutrition, and to construct poverty lines. However, it is generally recognized that the sufficiency of an individual's caloric intake cannot be determined, due to: a lack of consensus on...

The starting point in the paper is the relative concept of poverty. We will study how our picture of poverty will change if we accept a very relative concept of poverty. The first problem we encountered was the selection of the benchmark. A couple of alternative ways to conduct relativizations...

This brief chapter introduces researchers to the possibilities for subnational research using the harmonized data sets made available via the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) (www.lisproject.org). We first offer a brief overview of the LIS and discuss specific challenges for subnational research...

In the social policy debate, fundamentally different ideas prevail about the interlinkages between such key variables as employment, low pay, social transfers and poverty. This paper presents basic empirical evidence on the validity of these ideas and the policy prescriptions that follow from...

Substantial cross-national differences in poverty alleviation are well documented, but theextent to which different parts of the social transfer system account for this variation is still relatively unexamined. This study analyses the redistributive effects of specific social policy institutions...

Most examinations of United States domestic antipoverty policy are inherently parochial, for they are based on the experiences of only our nation in isolation from the others. However, cross-national comparisons can also teach lessons about antipoverty policy. While all nations value low...