The empirical assessment of multidimensional welfare,inequality and poverty: Sample weighted multivariate generalizations of the Kolmogorov–Smirnov two sample tests for stochastic dominance

Sample weighted multidimensional extensions to existing stochastic dominance, inequality and polarization comparison techniques are introduced and employed to examine whether or not ignoring multidimensional and sample weighting aspects result in misleading inferences. The techniques are employed in the context of a sample of nations, in essence each country in the sample is represented by an agent characterized by the per capita GNP of that country, the GNP growth rate of that country and the average life expectancy in that country. In essence the inequality that is being examined is that between the representative agents in these countries, intra country inequality is not being measured. The results suggest that multidimensional techniques lead to substantially different conclusions from those drawn from the use of unidimensional measures and that sample weighting also has a profound effect on the empirical outcomes. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Rural poverty

Abstract

This paper examines rural poverty indicators arguing that governments have failed to provide the equitable access to resources needed to empower rural people to address their poverty. The paper illustrates how the decline in the fortunes of agriculture has led to a rapid disintegration of rural communities and to human rights concerns in relation to rural people. On quality of life indicators such as health and education, rural people are seriously disad-vantaged by comparison with urban Australians. Yet, the failure of governments to develop integrated rural policy frameworks that deliver equitable resources and their reliance on market forces is leading to the destruction of rural communities. For social workers, the challenge is to provide advocacy and policy leadership.     

Unifying the poverty line: a critique of maintaining lower poverty standards for the elderly

Since 1982, the elderly poverty rate reported by the U.S. Census Bureau has fallen below the rate for the nonelderly population. This is cited as evidence of the success of U.S. social policies to benefit the elderly. But lower elderly poverty rates are an artifact of the fact that a lower, more stringent poverty line is applied to the elderly living in one- and two-person households, who constitute 85% of elderly persons. If the same poverty standard is applied to the elderly as to the nonelderly, the poverty rates are the same or slightly higher. The poverty line was originally based on the cost of an adequate diet. The lower standard for the elderly was based on the fact that the elderly consume fewer calories than nonelderly adults. This article shows there is no justification for this lower standard, and recommends its elimination. The overall nutrient requirements of the elderly are not lower, and the elderly spend a higher proportion of their budgets on food and on other necessities (shelter, health care) than the nonelderly. Alternative units of analysis examined under different income-pooling assumptions also show that poverty rates are not lower among the elderly than the nonelderly.     

Region-specific versus country-specific poverty lines in analysis of poverty

An analysis of poverty based on a country-specific income poverty line suffers from disregarding regional differences in prices and needs within a country and may, therefore, produce results that give a misleading picture of the extent of poverty as well as the geographic and demographic composition of the poor. To account for differences in prices and needs, this paper introduces an alternative method for identifying the poor based on a set of region-specific poverty lines. Applying Norwegian household register data for 2001 we find that the national level of poverty is only slightly affected by the change in definition of poverty line. However, the geographic as well as the demographic poverty profiles are shown to depend heavily on whether the method for identifying the poor relies on region- or country-specific thresholds. As expected, the results demonstrate that an analysis of poverty based on a country-specific threshold produces downward biased poverty rates in urban areas and upward biased poverty rates in rural areas. Moreover, when region-specific poverty thresholds form the basis of the poverty analysis, we find that the poverty rates among young singles and non-western immigrants are significantly higher than what is suggested by previous empirical evidence based on a joint country-specific poverty line.     

Multidimensional poverty indices

This paper explores the axiomatic foundation of multidimensional poverty indices. Departing from the income approach which measures poverty by aggregating shortfalls of incomes from a pre-determined poverty-line income, a multidimensional index is a numerical representation of shortfalls of basic needs from some pre-specified minimum levels. The class of subgroup consistent poverty indices introduced by Foster and Shorrocks (1991) is generalized to the multidimensional context. New concepts necessary for the design of distribution-sensitive multidimensional poverty measures are introduced. Specific classes of subgroup consistent multidimensional poverty measures are derived based on sets of reasonable axioms. This paper also highlights the fact that domain restrictions may have a critical role in the design of multidimensional indices. Received: 1 March 1999/Accepted: 1 August 2000     

Subjective poverty equivalence scales for Euro Zone countries

We estimate subjective equivalence scales for the whole Euro Zone as well as its individual constituent countries using the European Income and Living Conditions (SILC) data. Importantly, by using minimum needs income question our approach does not require the specification of a complete social welfare function. Our subjective scales increase consistently with household size and countries with well-developed welfare states (Netherlands, Germany, France, and Belgium) show greater economies of scale than less developed welfare states (Spain, Portugal, and Greece). Our approach also allows us to estimate the marginal cost of a child; we find that for the Eurozone adding the first child is more costly than adding a third adult and that the marginal cost of children declines. Comparing modified OECD and our subjective poverty rates we find that the subjective scales ‘redistribute poverty’ away from larger to smaller households.     

Steps toward dismantling poverty for working, poor women

The majority of the world's poor people are women and many of them spend long hours doing paid and unpaid work. Pay inequities between men and women persist and income inequalities between the rich and poor are deepening. Working poor females, especially working poor mothers, struggle against considerable odds. This situation, and some steps that healthcare professionals can take toward dismantling poverty are addressed.     

Statistical inference for vector measures of inequality and poverty

In this paper, we consider methods of inference for vector measures of inequality and poverty. These vector measures may consist of several different scalar measures of inequality or poverty in a single dimension, several scalar measures of poverty which use different poverty lines, or several scalar measures of inequality or poverty in different dimensions. Our proposed methods are illustrated with a Monte Carlo simulation and two empirical examples utilizing Canadian household data.     

Targeting and child poverty

We examine the relative merits of targeting children within the household through price subsidies and cash transfers. To do so, we model the behavior of a household composed of one adult and one child. We then show that ‘favorable’ distortions from price subsidies may allow redistributing toward the child and then derive the conditions under which this redistributive scheme is more efficient than cash transfers. The framework is extended to account for possible paternalistic preferences of the social planner and for households composed of two adults with different preferences. Applied to a continuum of households, our approach is extended to the problem of child poverty alleviation. In contrast to the traditional view, we show that well-chosen subsidies may be more cost effective than cash transfers in reducing child poverty.     

Pathways to poverty reduction

Of the myriad approaches to reducing poverty, which have proved effective on a national scale? This article analyses 15 systematically selected national cases of demonstrated rapid poverty reduction, seeking insights into effective approaches to reducing poverty. From these 15 economies, in which the bottom quintile experienced an annual increase in income of at least 6% over at least a decade, emerge four poverty‐reduction pathways: (1) industrialisation, (2) rural development, (3) social welfare and (4) petroleum‐generated employment. In addition to helping us understand what policy approaches have actually helped reduce poverty, this article has implications for the understanding of economic growth, the impact of pro‐growth policies, the relationship between state and market, and the roles of non‐government organisations (NGOs) and civil society.     

Second degree Pareto dominance

We present and discuss a binary relation aimed at the study of the re-distribution of income. We characterize, in a number of ways, the set of income allocations that can be reached from an initial allocation through a sequence of pair-wise equalizing transfers, where the sequence contains no flow of income from any donor to anyone else who ends up strictly richer than this donor himself ends up at the outcome of the entire sequence. Thanks are due to Peter Lambert and James Mirrlees for their comments. Thon was with the Department of Economics, University of Macau, when some of the work on this paper was done.     

Masculinity and male dominance

The problems with established sociological and socio-psychological conceptions of masculinity are discussed, and it is argued that object-relations theory can provide a clearer understanding of masculinity. An ideal type of the development of masculinity is built up in contrast to similar ideal types of human development and the development of femininity as portrayed by recent feminist writers. The status of the ideal type is then discussed, drawing out its implications for the relationship between psychoanalysis and sociological analysis, and for the nature of social change.     

Elitism and stochastic dominance

Stochastic dominance has been typically used with a special emphasis on risk and inequality reduction something captured by the concavity of the utility function in the expected utility model. We claim that the applicability of the stochastic dominance approach goes far beyond risk and inequality measurement provided suitable adaptations be made. We apply in this article the stochastic dominance approach to the measurement of elitism which may be considered the opposite of egalitarianism. While the usual stochastic dominance quasi-orderings attach more value to more equal and more efficient distributions, our criteria ensure that, the more unequal and the more efficient the distribution, the higher it is ranked. Two instances are provided by (i) comparisons of scientific performance across institutions like universities or departments, and (ii) comparisons of affluence as opposed to poverty between countries.     

Religious dominance and empathy

Theory and Society - Why do some religious authorities empathize with outsiders while others espouse xenophobia? This paper argues that church leaders are less likely to display empathy when their...     

Sequential sharing rules for river sharing problems

We analyse the redistribution of a resource amongst agents who have claims to the resource and who are ordered linearly. A well known example of this particular situation is the river sharing problem. We exploit the linear order of agents to transform the river sharing problem to a sequence of two-agent river sharing problems. These reduced problems are mathematically equivalent to bankruptcy problems and can therefore be solved using any bankruptcy rule. Our proposed class of solutions, that we call sequential sharing rules, solves the river sharing problem. Our approach extends the bankruptcy literature to settings with a sequential structure of both the agents and the resource to be shared. In the paper, we first characterise the class of sequential sharing rules. Subsequently, we apply sequential sharing rules based on four classical bankruptcy rules, assess their properties, provide two characterisations of one specific rule, and compare sequential sharing rules with three alternative solutions to the river sharing problem.