Blog
Redefining Poverty in China and India: What Does This Mean for the Fight Against Global Poverty? Part I
Tony Addison and Miguel Niño-Zarazúa China and India are making immense strides in development. Growth in both countries has been impressive. But...
Blog
Measuring Poverty Over Time
by
Luc Christiaensen, Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen
August 2012
Luc Christiaensen and Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen If a person suddenly becomes poor, for example, due to an unexpected death or illness in the family...
Working Paper
Challenges for Latin American Cities
Current urban interventions, particularly in cities in developing countries like Santiago de Chile, evidence major neglect in understanding the way contemporary living takes place and how it is changing under processes of globalization, global...
Working Paper
Participatory Approaches and the Measurement of Human Well-being
This paper considers the use of participatory methods in international development research, and asks what contribution these can make to the definition and measurement of well-being. It draws on general lessons arising from the project level, two...
Working Paper
The Reliability of Small Area Estimation Prediction Methods to Track Poverty
Tracking poverty is predicated on the availability of comparable consumption data and reliable price deflators. However, regular series of strictly comparable data are only rarely available. Poverty prediction methods that track consumption...
Working Paper
Inequality and Welfare Evaluation of Heterogeneous Income Distributions
This paper establishes the principles which should govern the welfare and inequality analysis of heterogeneous income distributions. Two basic criteria—the ‘equity preference’ condition and the ‘compensation principle’—are shown to be fundamentally...
Working Paper
The Rise or Fall of World Inequality
In the age of globalization, the question whether inequality in the world rose or fell down, is a hot topic. Leading scholars in the field of economic inequality measurement developed methods to estimate empirically the distribution of welfare...
Working Paper
Conceptual and Measurement Issues in Poverty Analysis
The objective of this paper is to review a number of issues related to poverty, while taking stock of the ongoing research. Most of the remaining unresolved issues in poverty analysis are related directly or indirectly to the dynamics of poverty...
Journal Article
First Order Dominance Analysis
This paper performs a multidimensional first order dominance analysis of child wellbeing in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This methodology allows the ordinal ranking of the 11 provinces of the DRC in terms of their wellbeing based upon the...
Working Paper
Can the Context Mediate Macro-Policy Outcomes?
Local institutional and structural (meso) factors can play a role in mediating the returns to a macro-social policy. I focus on the Brazilian cash-transfer-programme Bolsa Familia and check how contextual features influence the returns to transfers...
Journal Special Issue
Measuring Poverty Over Time
People often move in and out of poverty, and the length of time spent in poverty can vary widely, likely affecting prospects of escaping and staying out of poverty. Current poverty measures do not account for these aspects. Should they? Are there...
Working Paper
First Order Dominance Analysis
This paper performs a multidimensional first order dominance (FOD) analysis of child wellbeing in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This methodology allows the ordinal ranking of the 11 provinces of the DRC in terms of their wellbeing based...
Working Paper
Reference groups and the poverty line
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...
Working Paper
Poverty Mapping with Aggregate Census Data
Spatially disaggregated maps of the incidence of poverty can be constructed by combining household survey data and census data. In some countries (notably China and India), national statistics agencies are reluctant, for reasons of confidentiality...
Working Paper
Causal pluralism and mixed methods in the analysis of poverty dynamics
This paper examines the relationship between poverty dynamics, causal pluralism, and mixed method research approaches. It reviews the nature and significance of the shift from the analysis of poverty status to poverty dynamics, discusses different...
Working Paper
Well-being and the Complexity of Poverty
This investigation studies human well-being from a subjective well-being approach. On the basis of a Mexican database the investigation shows that there is a weak relationship between subjective well-being and indicators of well-being such as income...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (June-July 2012)
Tony Addison I started writing this ‘From the Editor’s Desk’ in Accra, to the sound of an African drum band, preparing for a ceremony to mark the...
Blog
From The Editor's Desk (December 2012)
Tony Addison This year has rushed by at speed. For UNU-WIDER it’s been a year of big successes. We will have published some 110 working papers by the...
Blog
From the Editor's Desk (August 2012)
Tony Addison With this issue, Angle returns refreshed from its Nordic summer break. The sun continues to shine on the Baltic, although it is getting...
Working Paper
Pro-Poor Growth
This paper looks into the interrelation between economic growth, inequality, and poverty. Using the notion of pro-poor growth, this study examines to what extent the poor benefit from economic growth. First, various approaches to defining and...
Working Paper
Measuring Vulnerability to Poverty
Many argue that poverty is intimately linked with ‘vulnerability’. Still, there is no consensus about how to define and measure ‘vulnerability’. We review theory and describe strengths and limits of recently proposed measures. We then propose a...
Blog
Inequality in Focus at UNU-WIDER
27 August 2014 Jukka Pirttilä and Tony Addison The last few months have seen major research activity in the area of inequality at UNU-WIDER. An update...
Blog
UNU-WIDER Inequality Conference 2014: Country Comparisons and Conceptual Approaches
by
Roger Williamson
December 2014
18 December 2014 Roger Williamson In an earlier article I reviewed a number of the high-profile contributions to the September 2014 conference on...
Working Paper
Advancing Small Area Estimation
The poverty mapping methodology for estimating welfare rankings from small areas has proven to be useful in guiding allocation of government funds, regional planning, and general policy formulation. Nevertheless, poverty mapping also suffers from a...
Working Paper
The Impact of Multiple Imputation of Coarsened Data on Estimates on the Working Poor in South Africa
South African household surveys typically contain coarsened earnings data, which consist of a mixture of missing earnings values, point responses and interval-censored responses. This paper uses sequential regression multivariate imputation to impute...
Working Paper
Poverty and Time
We examine the measurement of individual poverty in an intertemporal context. Our aim is to capture the importance of persistence in a state of poverty and we characterize a corresponding individual intertemporal poverty measure. Our first axiom...