Reference groups and the poverty line: An axiomatic approach with an empirical illustration

A recent trend in the study of poverty is to consider a relative poverty line, one that is responsive to the nature of the income distribution. We develop an axiomatic approach to the determination of an amalgam poverty line. Given a reference income (e.g. the mean or the median), the amalgam poverty line becomes a weighted average of the absolute poverty line and the reference income, where the weights depend on the policy maker's preferences for aggregating the two components. The paper ends with an empirical illustration comparing rural and urban and areas in the People's Republic of China and India

On pro-poor growth and the measurement of convergence

This paper suggests decomposing the [beta] coefficient of a [beta]-convergence analysis into three components, two of them checking whether there was [sigma]-convergence and whether "pure mobility" was pro-poor. It appears that during the 1983-1995 period growth in Israel was pro-poor.Convergence Galton's fallacy Israel Pro-poor growth

Ordinal Variables and the Measurement of Upward and Downward Intergenerational Educational Mobility in European Countries

International audienceThis article proposes a new approach to the measurement of intergenerational mobility in education. Borrowing the concept of inequality-sensitive and additive achievement measure axiomatically developed by Apouey et al., we derive new indices of upward, downward, and total mobility, using a "movement approach." It turns out that the Prais-Bibby and Bartholomew mobility indices are particular cases of the mobility indices we introduce. We then present an empirical illustration based on the 2016 European Social Survey. Particular attention is given to within country differences between fathers to children and mothers to children educational mobility. When comparing two countries, we also make a distinction between gross and net mobility, the latter referring to the case where country differences in the educational structure of parents and children are neutralized

Measuring changes in the Russian middle class between 1992 and 2008: a nonparametric distributional analysis

Since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Russia is generally acknowl- edged to be one of the most complicated countries in the world, from a sociological perspective. In particular, the evolution of the Russian middle class is an interesting but highly complex phenomenon. Most works dealing with this issue are based on summary statistics, which do not fully convey all the information on income distribu- tion. In the present paper, we analyze the evolution of the middle class in Russia from 1992 to 2008, by applying a nonparametric tool, the “relative distribution,” to Russian household incomes. The relative density function is a proper density function which compares two distributions observed in different years, in order to describe patterns of differences on the entire income scale. Despite a stable pattern of high inequality, we found that after a period of income convergence characterized by a rise of the middle class, in 1998 Russian households income started to polarize and in 2008 one can observe a very high degree of polarization and a marked decrease in the middle class. This shrinking of the middle class affected particularly incomes below the median

On some extensions of the concept of growth incidence curves

This article proposes a decomposition of what Grimm (2007) called individual growth incidence curve into two components measuring the impact of structural mobility (measured through the traditional growth incidence curve) and of exchange mobility, respectively. It also suggests introducing a growth incidence curve that checks whether pure mobility was pro-poor. An illustration based on Israeli census data for the years 1983 and 1995 seems to confirm the usefulness of the proposed breakdown.