Poverty Social Exclusion And Stochastic Dominance

This book honors the memory of Tony Atkinson, who made significant contributions to the rigorous study of income inequality, poverty, and redistribution. These essays presented, covering a span of over 30 years of research and scholarship, have been at the forefront of distributional analysis, and many of them are of prime importance for contemporary developments in the real-valued measurement of poverty and inequality, with particular reference to the concepts of fuzzy poverty assessment, vulnerability, heterogeneity/multidimensionality, unit consistency, sub-group decomposability, and dominance criteria. While all of these articles have been previously published—singly or with co-authorship—in a number of professional journals or distinguished edited volumes, this book is greatly enriched by a substantial introductions by the authors, which place the contributions in context, highlights their inter-connectedness, and relates them to the work of Tony Atkinson and other scholars. This book is of intrinsic value to welfare analysts, as well as being a tribute to a very great scholar by a fellow economist.

This book provides a synthesis of some recent issues and an up-to-date treatment of some of the major important issues in distributional analysis that I have covered in my previous book Ethical Social Index Numbers, which was widely accepted by students, teachers, researchers and practitioners in the area. Wide coverage of on-going and advanced topics and their analytical, articulate and authoritative p- sentation make the book theoretically and methodologically quite contemporary and inclusive, and highly responsive to the practical problems of recent concern. Since many countries of the world are still characterized by high levels of income inequality, Chap. 1 analyzes the problems of income inequality measurement in detail. Poverty alleviation is an overriding goal of development and social policy. To formulate antipoverty policies, research on poverty has mostly focused on inco- based indices. In view of this, a substantive analysis of income-based poverty has been presented in Chap. 2. The subject of Chap. 3 is people’s perception about income inequality in terms of deprivation. Since polarization is of current concern to analysts and social decisi- makers, a discussion on polarization is presented in Chap. 4.

The events taking place in several of South Mediterranean countries since December 2010 show that multiple deprivations may be powerful drivers of political instability. Though improvements of the living conditions have been regularly principal demands along with civil and political liberties in the demonstrations, one of the main striking facts about this so-called “Arab Spring” is that poverty had not been given the same emphasis in southern Mediterranean countries during the last decades as in other areas of the developing and emerging world. Although the growing recognition that poverty is a multidimensional concept, studies of poverty in South Mediterranean countries have often been dominated by a monetary approach. However, there is a growing evidence that it is suitable to go beyond the money-metric measures of poverty and to supplement its results with other approaches that adopt a broader definition of well- being. Though poverty is only one of many causes of this “Arab Spring,” we argue that it is a key feature to understand these historic events and that it is necessary to draw a detailed picture of poverty and social exclusion for each one of these countries. Moreover, if the Union for the Mediterranean succeeds in fostering economic cooperation within the Mediterranean area, the focus on the population’s well-being of its southern members will deserve scrutiny in the next few years to understand the forces that will drive the Euro-Mediterranean relationships, in particular for migration issues. This book brings together recent advances on the measurement of poverty with empirical applications on South-Mediterranean countries. It introduces new tools for analyzing poverty and shows that the linkages between income and well-being are not straightforward and hinge on many determinants. It shows that the efficiency of poverty reducing policies should also be assessed on the basis of the satisfaction of non-income needs like health, education or participation in social life.

Poverty and inequality remain at the top of the global economic agenda, and the methodology of measuring poverty continues to be a key area of research. This new book, from a leading international group of scholars, offers an up to date and innovative survey of new methods for estimating poverty at the local level, as well as the most recent multidimensional methods of the dynamics of poverty. It is argued here that measures of poverty and inequality are most useful to policy-makers and researchers when they are finely disaggregated into small geographic units. Poverty and Social Exclusion: New Methods of Analysis is the first attempt to compile the most recent research results on local estimates of multidimensional deprivation. The methods offered here take both traditional and multidimensional approaches, with a focus on using the methodology for the construction of time-related measures of deprivation at the individual and aggregated levels. In analysis of persistence over time, the book also explores whether the level of deprivation is defined in terms of relative inequality in society, or in relation to some supposedly absolute standard. This book is of particular importance as the continuing international economic and financial crisis has led to the impoverishment of segments of population as a result of unemployment, bankruptcy, and difficulties in obtaining credit. The volume will therefore be of interest to all those working on economic, econometric and statistical methods and empirical analyses in the areas of poverty, social exclusion and income inequality.

This volume is a collection of papers presented at the first meeting of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ). The Societys aims are to provide an international forum for all researchers interested in the study of economic inequality and related fields, bringing together the diversity of perspectives. The conference was held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain in July 2005. Over eighty parallel sessions were offered, providing novel and interesting work from both mature scholars and as well as new PhDs. With so much quality work from which to choose, it was necessary to limit the scope of Research on Economic Inequality, Volume 14.The first five papers all employ Spanish data and cover topics such as child poverty, social preferences toward redistribution, social exclusion, and multidimensional poverty. The next three papers examine inequality in the EU using alternative methodologies. Chapter Nine explores poverty dynamics among the elderly in Italy. Chapter Ten presents and extends the state of the art in multidimensional inequality measurement. Chapters Eleven and Twelve contribute to the theoretical underpinnings of inequality measurement. Chapters Thirteen through Fifteen contain analytical papers focused on evaluating the effects of public policy on poverty and inequality. The final two chapters use the questionnaire-experimental approach to examine individuals distributional preferences. This book is part of the "Research on Economic Inequality" series. It presents papers form the inaugural meeting of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ). It provides an international forum for all researchers interested in the study of economic inequality and related fields. It brings together a diversity of perspectives.

This volume is a collection of selected studies on poverty and well-being in East Africa. Using a multidimensional approach, the authors hope to provide a broad view of poverty and a thorough account of the variables that contribute to it. As opposed to traditional studies of poverty, which focus mainly on material well-being, this volume includes criteria such as material standard of living, health, education, housing, personal security, access to information, freedom, participation in organization, corruption, trust, and employment. The studies highlighted in this volume are grouped into the following four research areas: child poverty and malnutrition, dynamics and determinants of poverty, multidimensional measures of poverty, and energy-environment-poverty relationships. Together, these studies provide a comprehensive picture of the state of multidimensional poverty, its measurement, causal factors, and policies and practices in Burundi, Cameron, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda and Tanzania. The methodology utilized in the studies is diverse as well, ranging from econometric analysis to decision theory, to neoclassical growth models. This book is geared towards students and researchers interested in economic development, welfare, and poverty in Africa as well as policy makers and members of NGOs and international aid agencies.

Ranking social states using individual rankings, strategic and non-strategic behaviors of individuals, ethical issues in distributional analysis.