If estimates are based on samples, they should be accompanied by appropriate standard errors and confidence intervals. This is true for scientific research in general, and is even more important if estimates are used to inform and evaluate policy measures such as those aimed at attaining the Europe 2020 poverty reduction target. In this article I…

In this article we present a new composite index of child health, applied to the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) of Africa, one of the areas of the planet most castigated by poverty. Our index has been constructed attending to the variables defined in the Goals of the Millennium Declaration. For this purpose we will use the P2 distance method for…

The aim of this paper is to propose multidimensional measures of deprivation and wellbeing in contemporary Switzerland, in order to overcome the limitations of standard approaches. More precisely, we have developed self organising maps (SOM) using data drawn from the 2009 Swiss Household Panel wave, in order to identify highly homogeneous clusters…

This paper explores causes of differences in estimates of poverty incidence in Uganda since the early 1990s as measured by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics and the World Bank. While both sets of estimates from the two organisations show a declining trend in poverty incidence there are important differences in the levels of poverty, the speed of the…

Using consumption expenditure data of the National Sample Survey 2004-2005, this paper estimates the size of elderly poor and tests the hypotheses that elderly households are not economically better-off compared to non-elderly households in India. Poverty estimates are derived under three scenarios--by applying the official cut-off point of the…

The subjective well-being approach to environmental valuation is applied to analyze the valuation of greenhouse gas emissions with a fairness-adjustment in the valuation exercise. Results indicate that industrialized countries have high willingness-to-pay to reduce emissions. Developing countries differ in their valuations. Results indicate that…

In this paper, we evaluate income distributions in four European countries (Austria, Italy, Spain and Hungary) using two complementary approaches: a standard approach based on reported incomes in survey data, and a microsimulation approach, where taxes and benefits are simulated. These two approaches may be expected to generate slightly different…

Thailand has been a global economic success story, transforming from one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, to a modern and dynamic nation, and all within the lifetime of the current generation. However, growth has been accompanied by marked increases in economic inequality both at the regional and individual levels. In this…

Growing life expectancy and changes in financial, marriage and labour markets have placed the income position of the elderly at the center of scientific and political discourse. As a consequence, the last decades witnessed the publication of various influential reports that contained comparative statistics on old age income inequalities on the…

The most prominent theory to explain the curvilinear relationship between income and subjective well-being (SWB) is need theory, which proposes that increased income and wealth can lead to increased well-being in poverty because money is used to satisfy basic physiological needs. The present study tests the tenets of need theory by proposing that…

Important steps have been taken at international summits to set up goals and targets to improve the wellbeing of children worldwide. Now the world also has more and better data to monitor progress. This paper presents a new approach to monitoring progress in child poverty reduction based on the Alkire and Foster adjusted headcount ratio and an…

Conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) have two main objectives: reducing poverty and increasing the human capital of children. To reach these objectives, transfers are given to poor households conditioned on investments in their children's education, health, and nutrition. Targeting mechanisms used by CCTs have been generally successful in…

The measurement of development or poverty as multidimensional phenomena is very difficult because there are several theoretical, methodological and empirical problems involved. The literature of composite indicators offers a wide variety of aggregation methods, all with their pros and cons. In this paper, we propose a new, alternative composite…

Defining the poverty line has been acknowledged as being highly variable by the majority of published literature. Despite long discussions and successes, poverty line has a number of problems due to its arbitrary nature. This paper proposes three measurements of poverty lines using membership functions based on fuzzy set theory. The three…

Theoretical and empirical studies have recently adopted a multidimensional concept of poverty. There is considerable debate about the most appropriate degree of multidimensionality to retain in the analysis. In this work we add to the received literature in two ways. First, we derive indicators of multiple deprivation by applying a particular…