MEASURING INEQUALITY, POVERTY, GROWTH AND WELFARE VIA THE USE OF ASSET INDEXES: THE CASE OF ARMENIA, AZERBAIJAN AND GEORGIA

Joseph Deutsch (), Jacques Silber, Yongsheng Xu and Guanghua Wan
Additional contact information
Joseph Deutsch: Bar-Ilan University, Israel

The Singapore Economic Review (SER), 2020, vol. 65, issue supp01, 7-33

Abstract: This paper examines the evolution of inequality, poverty and welfare in the South Caucasian Asian states, using an aggregate index based on consumer durables available to the households. Instead of using principal components analysis to aggregate asset indicators into an overall asset index, we propose an ordinal approach to using data on assets, when estimating the wealth of a household (or individual). Using three different approaches (the concept of order of acquisition of durable goods, item response theory and correspondence analysis), we first derive the order of importance of the different assets. Then, we compute indices introduced recently to measure inequality, poverty and achievement, when only ordinal variables are available. Our empirical analysis, based on data collected by the Caucasus Barometer and covering the three states in South Caucasus shows that there exists such an order, that it does not really depend on the statistical approach adopted and that it was very similar in 2009 and 2013. Our results show that among the three countries analyzed, Armenia had the lowest degree of inequality in asset ownership and Georgia the highest. Whatever the approach or index used, ordinal inequality, increased in Armenia and Azerbaijan between 2009 and 2013, but slightly decreased during that period in Georgia. It also appears that poverty decreased in all three countries during this period. There was also important growth, when measuring the latter via the welfare index recently introduced by Apouey et al. (2019), assuming their parameter α→1.

Keywords: Achievement indices; asset indices; correspondence analysis; counting approach; item response theory; multidimensional poverty; order of acquisition of durable goods; ordinal inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217590819440016
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:serxxx:v:65:y:2020:i:supp01:n:s0217590819440016

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0217590819440016

Access Statistics for this article

The Singapore Economic Review (SER) is currently edited by Euston Quah

More articles in The Singapore Economic Review (SER) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().