Measuring Uncertainty for Poverty Indicators at Regional Level: The Case of Mediterranean Countries

Ilaria Benedetti, Federico Crescenzi and Tiziana Laureti
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Ilaria Benedetti: Department of Economics, Engineering, Society and Business, University of Tuscia, Via del Paradiso, 47, 01100 Viterbo, Italy
Federico Crescenzi: Department of Statistics, Computer Science, Applications “G. Parenti”, University of Florence, 50134 Florence, Italy
Tiziana Laureti: Department of Economics, Engineering, Society and Business, University of Tuscia, Via del Paradiso, 47, 01100 Viterbo, Italy

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 19, 1-19

Abstract: Over the last years, there has been an increased interest in compiling poverty indicators as well as in providing uncertainty measures both at national and regional level. In this paper, we provide point and variance estimates of two widely used income-poverty indicators, which belong to the class of the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT), and two widely used income-inequality indicators. We focused on Mediterranean countries since they have been severely hit by the Great Recession which increased poverty intensity and socio-economic inequalities. By using the 2018 EU-SILC data we analysed the spatial distribution of poverty by constructing maps at NUTS2 territorial level. Our estimation results reveal that national poverty indicators hide a high heterogeneity of poverty across regions within each country, especially for Italy and Spain. This study also provides computations of standard errors at regional level which have been explored only in a limited number of papers. To this aim we adopted the Jackknife replication method thanks to its convenient properties. As expected, the uncertainty measure is influenced by the reduced number of sampling units in each NUTS2 region especially in some regions of Spain and Italy. The Jackknife method proved to perform well in the case of income-inequality indicators especially for Greece, Italy, Croatia and Portugal.

Keywords: official poverty indicators; uncertainty measurement; Jackknife replication method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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