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In Spain there is a high incidence of in-work poverty, which has not changed much after the so-called Great Recession, despite its strong impact on the economy and the labour market. The first objective of this article is to analyse the evolution of poverty during the economic cycle between the previous crisis and the period immediately prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, using indicators with a poverty line anchored at the beginning of that period. This addresses the relative nature of the official indicator, which is calculated for each year, preventing it from capturing changes in the incidence of poverty over time. A second objective is to determine which dimensions are most relevant for in-work poverty and its evolution. Thus, in-work poverty is conceptualised as a phenomenon composed of an individual and a household reality, distinguishing between individual poverty (low-pay situations), household poverty (coming from in-work poverty statistics), and severe poverty (the conjunction of family poverty and low pay). In addition, the last purpose is to analyse the influence of economic cycles, both on the weight of each of the types of in-work poverty and on the factors that explain them, exploring which groups suffered most from the Great Recession and whether this was a temporary situation. Our findings were mainly threefold. First, in 2019, just before the COVID crisis, in-work poverty rates had not recovered from the previous crisis, especially in the case of severe poverty. Second, individual in-work poverty declines during the crisis, associated with an increase in the overall unemployment rate and a parallel increase in severe poverty, but partially recovers in 2019. Third, the most severe type of in-work poverty, where the individual and household dimension converge, has similar characteristics to household in-work poverty, mainly influence by the presence of children and single-parent families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the influence of social welfare and tax policies on rates of chronic and transient poverty in the United States for the full population and subgroups. I use longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (n = 10,210) over a recent 11-year time frame (1998-2008), with individuals categorized as poor using the Supplemental Poverty Measure. Results show that including government transfers in family resources reduces the overall transient poverty rate by more than one-sixth and the chronic poverty rate by nearly four-fifths, with a greater influence on the chronic rate in part because some individuals shift from chronic into transient poverty. Income and payroll tax liabilities have negligible influence on poverty rates net of tax credits. Medical expenses are largely associated with an increase in the transient poverty rate. Results imply that there is value to examining the effects of social policy on poverty from more than just the traditional cross-sectional perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty is commonly defined as a lack of economic resources that has negative social consequences, but surprisingly little is known about the importance of economic hardship for social outcomes. This article offers an empirical investigation into this issue. We apply panel data methods on longitudinal data from the Swedish Level-of-Living Survey 2000 and 2010 (n = 3089) to study whether poverty affects four social outcomes-close social relations (social support), other social relations (friends and relatives), political participation, and activity in organizations. We also compare these effects across five different poverty indicators. Our main conclusion is that poverty in general has negative effects on social life. It has more harmful effects for relations with friends and relatives than for social support; and more for political participation than organizational activity. The poverty indicator that shows the greatest impact is material deprivation (lack of cash margin), while the most prevalent poverty indicators-absolute income poverty, and especially relative income poverty-appear to have the least effect on social outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fuzzy conceptualization of privation has been a step closer to more realistic handling of poverty. However, fuzzy approaches to poverty are still grounded on parametric axioms. Moreover, construction of poverty lines within these approaches still relies on ad-hoc methods. In this paper, we advance instead a fuzzy procedure based on the non-parametric bootstrap method, allowing us to depict fuzzy unidimensional privation states with boundaries drawn spontaneously from data. Fuzzy non-parametric measures of privation within each state as well as a collective fuzzy non-parametric index of poverty are derived, along with their corresponding confidence intervals. The new approach is applied to the analysis of poverty in Tunisia in 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines poverty dynamics in Turkey using a nationally representative panel data covering the 2005-08 period. The aim is to understand mobility in and out of poverty and its correlates. We find that almost a quarter of the poor are persistently poor. The conditional and unconditional exit rates that we estimate are within the range of values reported for developed countries in the literature. That the income events-but not transfers-dominate both poverty entries and exits is indicative of the major role labor markets play in the lives of the poor. In particular, we argue that given the characteristics of the poor and modest levels of social assistance, the reason for mobility rates close to European averages must be sought in the informal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty has remained largely unabated in Nigeria despite the efforts made in tackling it. Previous studies on poverty focused on total expenditure and did not adequately cater for regional differences in prices, needs, tastes and preferences. This study, therefore, examined the incidence, depth and severity of food poverty in Nigeria and produced a food poverty profile for the country based on zone-specific food poverty lines. The study used data from National Bureau of Statistics' Nigeria Living Standard Survey, 2004. Linear programming technique in the spirit of the Food- Energy-Intake (FEI) approach, and the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) index were utilized. The estimates of the study showed, among other things, that food poverty lines varied across zones, and food poverty was pervasive in the country and varied across zones. Thus policies and programs that will adequately increase people's access to food and minimize the incidence of food poverty in Nigeria should be adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of poverty in Russia is analyzed in terms of “deprivation poverty” and “income poverty” in connection with problems of the multifaceted nature of the country's economy. The article examines the structural preconditions of poverty in Russia. It offers assessments of the different types of poverty (preindustrial, industrial, and postindustrial) and recommendations on how to combat poverty, taking into account the characteristics of each type. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article proposes a new approach to the analysis of poverty. Along with the criterion of poverty that is linked to people's incomes the authors propose to include criteria based on the analysis of people's deprivations. Formally their incomes may be higher than the subsistence minimum, but their actual situation in life may put them in a difficult position. The new approach to the problem of poverty dictates the need to change the priorities of state social policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We examine differences in income within the United States, and the regions of persistent poverty that have arisen, using a newly assembled county-level data set linking 19th century Census data with contemporary data. We identify the roles of current differences in aggregate production technologies and factor endowments, together with contributions of historical institutions, culture, geography, and human capital. We allow for possible cross-county factor mobility via a correlated random effects GMM estimator and find evidence of significant regional differences in production technologies. Our decompositions of the poor/nonpoor income gap suggest that at least three-fourths of the gap is explained by differences in productive factors. Persistently poor counties are different (and poorer) primarily because they have lower levels of factors of production, not because they use the factors they have less efficiently. Together, historical and contemporary human capital explain over half of the overall income gap between persistently poor and nonpoor counties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we discuss two methods commonly used in the literature to measure chronic poverty, the permanent income approach (where the chronically poor are those whose mean income over time is below the poverty line) and the spells approach (where the chronically poor are those households who are below the poverty line half of the time or more). We check the differences between these two methods considering also several household characteristics. The index we use is that of Foster, Greer and Thorbecke, FGT, with and. When each method identifies the chronically poor (which could be different individuals by each method) and shows the percentage of the chronically poor, while when the methods also take into account the depth of poverty. Our main goal is to show the differences between the two methods, so that policymakers would have different perspectives on the problem of chronic poverty and could make decisions on this basis. The results show that, in the data used, the permanent method and the spells method classify the households into chronically poor and nonchronically poor definitions almost similarly in some cases. Thus, when measuring chronic poverty using the FGT index with , the levels of chronic poverty measured by the two methods are quite the same for the whole population as well as for subgroups of the population. Nevertheless, when using the FGT index with , the permanent method and the spells method give different results, as they take into account the depth of poverty differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how the measurement of the official Indonesian poverty figures has evolved since 1984, when Badan Pusat Statistik (BPS), Indonesia's central statistics agency, published its first poverty report. Since then, BPS has on several occasions revised the underlying methodology for how it calculates poverty. These changes have, in general, improved the way that poverty in Indonesia is measured, but they make it difficult to compare poverty figures over time. In fact, only poverty estimates (at the national and provincial level) since 2007 are based on the same methodological approach. This article presents the first detailed description of official poverty measurement in Indonesia since Booth's (1993) study, in English, and Sutanto and Avenzora's (1999) study, in Indonesian. It constitutes a unique repository for anybody who wants to understand the technical details of official poverty measurement in Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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We discuss poverty measurement, focusing on two alternatives to the current official measure: consumption poverty, and the Census Bureau's new Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) that was released for the first time last year. The SPM has advantages over the official poverty measure, including a more defensible adjustment for family size and composition, an expanded definition of the family unit that includes cohabitors, and a definition of income that is conceptually closer to resources available for consumption. The SPM's definition of income, though conceptually broader than pre-tax money income, is difficult to implement given available data and their accuracy. Furthermore, income data do not capture consumption out of savings and tangible assets such as houses and cars. A consumption-based measure has similar advantages but fewer disadvantages. We compare those added to and dropped from the poverty rolls by the alternative measures relative to the current official measure. We find that the SPM adds to poverty individuals who are more likely to be college graduates, own a home and a car, live in a larger housing unit, have air conditioning, health insurance, and substantial assets, and have other more favorable characteristics than those who are dropped from poverty. Meanwhile, we find that a consumption measure compared to the official measure or the SPM adds to the poverty rolls individuals who are more disadvantaged than those who are dropped. We decompose the differences between the SPM and official poverty and find that the most problematic aspect of the SPM is the subtraction of medical out-of-pocket expenses from SPM income. Also, because the SPM poverty thresholds change in an odd way over time, it will be hard to determine if changes in poverty are due to changes in income or changes in thresholds. Our results present strong evidence that a consumption-based poverty measure is preferable to both the official income-based poverty measure and to the Supplemental Poverty Measure for determining who are the most disadvantaged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• In Chile, monetary and multidimensional poverty measures diverge in their identification of the poor over the last of 25 years. • The diverging identification of the poor is associated to the reduction of household size, rurality and improved household education. • The diverging identification of the poor can be a general process. It might have distributive consequences on the poor in transition countries. • The household non-eligibility across indicators of the multidimensional poverty index is a relevant empirical issue. This paper investigates the degree of association in the identification of the poor between the standard monetary FGT poverty measure and the Alkire-Foster Multidimensional Poverty Index. For this purpose, we use a measure of redundancy in the identification of the poor between the two poverty measures (R0). In Chile, over the past 25 years, R0 has declined at a rate of 1.5% per year. The decline is unimportant during the 1990s, a decade of rapid economic growth, while it is notable thereafter, in a period characterized by modest economic growth and the progressive introduction and deepening of social policies. The conditional correlation between socio-economic and demographic characteristics with R0 is examined at the province and household levels. After controlling for the household non-eligibility across some of the indicators of the multidimensional poverty index, we find that the divergence in the identification of the poor seems to be a real process which is not randomly distributed across the population. It is correlated with education improvements, increasing urbanization, and reduction in household size. On the basis of our results, we argue that this divergence may be a more general phenomenon that tends to occur in countries undergoing demographic transition, urbanization, and progress in education. If so, and given the fact that poverty alleviation strategies are adopted partly on the basis of poverty statistics, the diverging identification of the poor might have distributive consequences for the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]