Poverty: Looking for the Real Elasticities

After decades of intensive research on the statistical size distribution of income and despite its empirical weaknesses, the lognormal distribution still enjoys an important popularity in the applied literature dedicated to poverty and inequality. In the present study, we emphasize the drawbacks of this choice for the calculation of the elasticities of poverty. Using last version of WIID database, we estimate the growth and inequality elasticities of poverty using 1,842 income distributions under fifteen rival distribution assumptions. Our results confirm that the lognormal distribution is not appropriate for the analysis of poverty. Most of the time, it implies an overestimation of the elasticities and bias our estimation of the relative impact of growth and redistribution on poverty alleviation.cerdi

Erratum to ``The estimation of the growth and redistribution components of changes in poverty: a reassessment'''

This erratum corrects some typos and misspecifications in Bresson (2008).

Poverty: Looking for the Real Elasticities

After decades of intensive research on the statistical size distribution of income and despite its empirical weaknesses, the lognormal distribution still enjoys an important popularity in the applied literature dedicated to poverty and inequality. In the present study, we emphasize the drawbacks of this choice for the calculation of the elasticities of poverty. Using last version of WIID database, we estimate the growth and inequality elasticities of poverty using 1,842 income distributions under fifteen rival distribution assumptions. Our results confirm that the lognormal distribution is not appropriate for the analysis of poverty. Most of the time, it implies an overestimation of the elasticities and bias our estimation of the relative impact of growth and redistribution on poverty alleviation.

The estimation of the growth and redistribution components of changes in poverty: a reassessment

What are the respective contributions of growth and inequality changes to observed poverty variations? Many studies have attempted to provide some empirical evidence to answer this question using case studies with decompositions of observed poverty spells. Most of them rely on two decomposition frameworks suggested by Datt & Ravallion (1992) on the one hand, and Shorrocks (1999) and Kakwani (2000) on the other hand. However, despite their properties, these techniques are not appropriate for such an accounting exercise. Here, following Muller (2006), we propose an alternative decomposition procedure that is consistent with definitions of growth and inequality effects stemming from time-integral calculus. Contrary to the aforementioned methods, the proposed technique simultaneously fits the observed pattern of income distributions changes and does not produce large residual components.Poverty variations decomposition

“Leftist”, “Rightist” and Intermediate Decompositions of Poverty Variations with an Application to China from 1990 to 2003

This paper investigates the influence of invariance axioms in the decomposition of observed poverty variations into growth and inequality effects. After a complete and critical review of the invariance axioms suggested in the literature, we show that few information is needed for the ordering of the effects respectively obtained through scale, translation and intermediate invariance. Using Chinese data for the period 1990-2003, we find that some commonly observed results of the decomposition are contingent to the invariance axiom choices whilst other are robust to changes in ethical preferences.Poverty;inequality effect;growth effect;Decomposition;scale invariance;translationinvariance;intermediate invariance;China

“Leftist”, “Rightist” and Intermediate Decompositions of Poverty: Variations with an Application to China from 1990 to 2003

This paper investigates the influence of invariance axioms in the decomposition of observed poverty variations into growth and inequality effects. After a complete and critical review of the invariance axioms suggested in the literature, we show that few information is needed for the ordering of the effects respectively obtained through scale, translation and intermediate invariance. Using Chinese data for the period 1990-2003, we find that some commonly observed results of the decomposition are contingent to the invariance axiom choices whilst other are robust to changes in ethical preferences.Poverty, inequality effect, growth effect, decomposition, scale invariance, translation invariance, intermediate invariance, China.

“Leftist”, “Rightist” and Intermediate Decompositions of Poverty Variations with an Application to China from 1990 to 2003

This paper investigates the influence of invariance axioms in the decomposition of observed poverty variations into growth and inequality effects. After a complete and critical review of the invariance axioms suggested in the literature, we show that few information is needed for the ordering of the effects respectively obtained through scale, translation and intermediate invariance. Using Chinese data for the period 1990-2003, we find that some commonly observed results of the decomposition are contingent to the invariance axiom choices whilst other are robust to changes in ethical preferences.Poverty, inequality effect, growth effect, Decomposition, scale invariance, translationinvariance, intermediate invariance, China

Corpus-Based Transcription as an Approach to the Compositional Control of Timbre

Timbre space is a cognitive model useful to address the problem of structuring timbre in electronic music. The recent concept of corpus-based concatenative sound synthesis is proposed as an approach to timbral control in both real- and deferred-time applications. Using CataRT and related tools in the FTM and Gabor libraries for Max/MSP we describe a technique for real-time analysis of a live signal to pilot corpus-based synthesis, along with examples of compositional realizations in works for instruments, electronics, and sound installation. To extend this technique to computer-assisted composition for acoustic instruments, we develop tools using the Sound Description Interchange Format (SDIF) to export sonic descriptors to OpenMusic where they may be further manipulated and transcribed into an instrumental score. This presents a flexible technique for the compositional organization of noise-based instrumental sounds