The paper investigates the definition of equity-regarding poverty measures when there are different household types in the population. It derives the implications of a between-type regressive transfer principle for poverty measures, for the choice of poverty lines and for the measurement of...

While all nations value low poverty, high levels of economic self-reliance, and equality of opportunity for younger persons, they differ dramatically in the extent to which they reach these goals. Most nations have remarkable similarities in the sources of social concern within each nation -...

This paper applies generalized Lorenz analysis to income distributions of ten countries using advanced statistical procedures to construct confidence bands around estimates and to generate truncated generalized Lorenz curves to construct a poverty ordering of the countries.

It is widely held that people who work have no difficulty in avoiding poverty and guaranteeing their family a decent standard of living. This idea has proved false, as many authors have shown that the ranks of the poor are filled with active people, sometimes even working full time. But,...

This paper investigates the real living standards and poverty status of United States children in the 1990's compared to the children in 17 other nations, including Europe, Scandinavia, Canada and Australia. We find that American low-income children have lower real spendable income than do...

In our paper we present a comparative analysis of the effects of family policy measures on poverty patterns in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. A special attention is devoted to changes in the extent, depth and composition of poverty, in particular that of the youngest generation....

This paper surveys a dozen international comparative studies of poverty, income distribution and older people in industrialized countries using data up to the mid-1990s. It addresses a series of questions. At what level are the incomes of the elderly relative to the population as a whole? How...

The title of this article is taken from the inspirational slogan of President George W. Bush, whose recently passed Elementary and Sunday Education Act bears this title. In this bill, as in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, accountability won the day over federal fiscal support for low-income...

In this paper, the relationship between the degree of centralisation and the distributive outcomes in European schemes of social assistance is investigated. For this purpose, a scheme of classification suitable for grouping the EU15 schemes according to features related to centralisation is...

We introduce two separate datasets (The Global Consumption Dataset (GCD) and The Global Income Dataset (GID)) containing an unprecedented portrait of consumption and income of persons over time, within and across countries, around the world. The benchmark version of the dataset presents...