Multidimensional poverty measurement : making the identification of the poor count?

6th Meeting of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ), celebrat a Luxemburg, 13-15 de juliol de 2015The success of any poverty eradication program crucially depends on its ability to identify who is poor and who is not. In this paper, we show that the state-of-the-art methodology that is used to identify the poor in multidimensional contexts -the dual cutoff method suggested by Alkire and Foster- is insensitive to many of the subtle considerations that should be incorporated when making such delicate decisions. The simplicity of the counting approach that underlies the dual cutoff method precludes the possibility of generating "poor-identification rules" that are sensitive to interactions between the different dimensions of poverty. To go beyond the apples-and-oranges aggregation procedures characterizing the dual cutoff method, we suggest a much broader identification approach that contains the latter as a particular case. Our empirical findings using 48 Demographic and Health Surveys across the developing world suggest that the percentage of households that are inconsistenly identified as "poor" according to the dual cutoff and some of the methods suggested in this paper is around 30% -a result with enormous implications for the identification of the potential beneficiaries of poverty eradication programs worldwide

Rock, Rap, or Reggaeton?: Assessing Mexican Immigrants' Cultural Assimilation Using Facebook Data

The degree to which Mexican immigrants in the U.S. are assimilating culturally has been widely debated. To examine this question, we focus on musical taste, a key symbolic resource that signals the social positions of individuals. We adapt an assimilation metric from earlier work to analyze self-reported musical interests among immigrants in Facebook. We use the relative levels of interest in musical genres, where a similarity to the host population in musical preferences is treated as evidence of cultural assimilation. Contrary to skeptics of Mexican assimilation, we find significant cultural convergence even among first-generation immigrants, which problematizes their use as assimilative "benchmarks" in the literature. Further, 2nd generation Mexican Americans show high cultural convergence vis-\`a-vis both Anglos and African-Americans, with the exception of those who speak Spanish. Rather than conforming to a single assimilation path, our findings reveal how Mexican immigrants defy simple unilinear theoretical expectations and illuminate their uniquely heterogeneous character.Comment: WebConf 201

Changing contribution of area-level deprivation to total variance in age at death: a population-based decomposition analysis

Objectives Two processes generate total variance in age at death: heterogeneity (between-group variance) and individual stochasticity (within-group variance). Limited research has evaluated how these two components have changed over time. We quantify the degree to which area-level deprivation contributed to total variance in age at death in Scotland between 1981 and 2011. Design Full population and mortality data for Scotland were obtained and matched with the Carstairs score, a standardised z-score calculated for each part-postcode sector that measures relative area-level deprivation. A z-score above zero indicates that the part-postcode sector experienced higher deprivation than the national average. A z-score below zero indicates lower deprivation. From the aggregated data we constructed 40 lifetables, one for each deprivation quintile in 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011 stratified by sex. Primary outcome measures Total variance in age at death and the proportion explained by area-level deprivation heterogeneity (between-group variance). Results The most deprived areas experienced stagnating or slightly increasing variance in age at death. The least deprived areas experienced decreasing variance. For males, the most deprived quintile life expectancy was between 7% and 11% lower and the SD is between 6% and 25% higher than the least deprived. This suggests that the effect of deprivation on the SD of longevity is comparable to its effect on life expectancy. Decomposition analysis revealed that contributions from between-group variance doubled between 1981 and 2011 but at most only explained 4% of total variance. Conclusions This study adds to the emerging body of literature demonstrating that socio-economic groups have experienced diverging trends in variance in age at death. The contribution from area-level deprivation to total variance in age at death, which we were able to capture, has doubled since 1981. Area-level deprivation may play an increasingly important role in mortality inequalities

Is young adult excess mortality a natural phenomenon?

The risk of death is high at birth and during the first years of life, but it decreases through childhood to a minimum at around 10 years. It then begins a steady increase throughout adult life. Young adults, however, are often an exception, with higher than expected mortality, as Adrien Remund, Carlo Giovanni Camarda, and Tim Riffe explain. Is this natural in humans, or are there other factors involved

Monitoring life expectancy levels during the COVID-19 pandemic : example of the unequal impact of the first wave on Spanish regions

Background: To provide an interpretable summary of the impact on mortality of the COVID-19 pandemic we estimate weekly and annual life expectancies at birth in Spain and its regions. Methods: We used daily death count data from the Spanish Daily Mortality Monitoring System (MoMo), and death counts from 2018, and population on July 1st, 2019 by region (CCAA), age groups, and sex from the Spanish National Statistics Institute. We estimated weekly and annual (2019 and 2020*, the shifted annual calendar period up to 5 july 2020) life expectancies at birth as well as their differences with respect to 2019. Results: Weekly life expectancies at birth in Spain were lower in weeks 11-20, 2020 compared to the same weeks in 2019. This drop in weekly life expectancy was especially strong in weeks 13 and 14 (March 23rd to April 5th), with national declines ranging between 6.1 and 7.6 years and maximum regional weekly declines of up to 15 years in Madrid. Annual life expectancy differences between 2019 and 2020 also reflected an overall drop in annual life expectancy of 0.9 years for both men and women. These drops ranged between 0 years in several regions (e.g. Canary and Balearic Islands) to 2.8 years among men in Madrid. Conclusions: Life expectancy is an easy to interpret measure for understanding the heterogeneity of mortality patterns across Spanish regions. Weekly and annual life expectancy are sensitive useful indicators for understanding disparities and communicating the gravity of the situation because differences are expressed in intuitive year units

Is young adult excess mortality a natural phenomenon?

The risk of death is high at birth and during the first years of life, but it decreases through childhood to a minimum at around 10 years. It then begins a steady increase throughout adult life. Young adults, however, are often an exception, with higher than expected mortality, as Adrien Remund, Carlo Giovanni Camarda, and Tim Riffe explain. Is this natural in humans, or are there other factors involved

Spousal and parental roles among female student populations in 55 low-and middle-income countries

This paper exploits a vast database of international census and survey microdata to examine the relationship between school enrolment on the one hand and the status of being in a union or a parent on the other among female adolescents and young adults in low-and middle-income countries. Our analysis is based on widespread evidence for 55 countries among 15 to 24 year-old females. High shares of student population are strongly correlated with low shares in spousal and parental roles between countries. We show that this relationship is driven by the fact that students are less likely to be in spousal and parental roles compared to non-students. Nevertheless, as we compare older ages, the share of students reported as spouses and/or mothers increases. The prevalence of spousal and parental roles among the student population is correlated to the overall levels of spouses and mothers in the total population, even when controlling for the level of school currently attained

Time-to-death patterns in markers of age and dependency

Altres ajuts: HHS/R01-AG011552Altres ajuts: HHS/R01-AG04024Altres ajuts: UK/ESRC/ES/K004611/1We aim to determine the extent to which variables commonly used to describe health, wellbeing, and disability in old-age vary primarily as a function of years lived (chronological age), years left (thanatological age), or as a function of both. We analyze data from the US Health and Retirement Study to estimate chronological age and time-to-death patterns in 78 such variables. We describe results from the birth cohort born 1915-1919 in the nal 12 years of life. Our results show that most markers used to study well-being in old-age vary along both the age and time-to-death dimensions, but some markers are exclusively a function of either time to death or chronological age, and others display different patterns between the sexes