Testing for Poverty Dominance: An Application to Canada

Jean-Yves Duclos and Wen-Hao Chen ()

UFAE and IAE Working Papers from Unitat de Fonaments de l'Anàlisi Econòmica (UAB) and Institut d'Anàlisi Econòmica (CSIC)

Abstract: The paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices. This helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across distributions. The tests, which can take into account the complex sampling procedures that are typically used by statistical agencies to generate household-level surveys, are im- plemented using the Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) for 1996, 1999 and 2002. Although the yearly cumulative distribution functions cross at the lower tails of the distributions, the more recent years tend to domi- nate earlier years for a relatively wide range of poverty lines. Failing to take into account SLID's sampling variability (as is sometimes done) can inflate significantly one's confidence in ranking poverty. Taking into account SLID's complex sampling design (as has not been done before) can also decrease substantially the range of poverty lines over which a poverty ranking can be inferred.

Keywords: Stochastic dominance; empirical likelihood; Canada; income distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C15 D31 D63 I30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32
Date: 2009-04-20
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://pareto.uab.es/wp/2009/76909.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Testing for poverty dominance: an application to Canada (2015)
Journal Article: Testing for poverty dominance: an application to Canada (2011)
Journal Article: Testing for poverty dominance: an application to Canada (2011)
Working Paper: Testing for Poverty Dominance: An Application to Canada (2008)
Working Paper: Testing for Poverty Dominance: an Application to Canada (2008)
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:aub:autbar:769.09

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in UFAE and IAE Working Papers from Unitat de Fonaments de l'Anàlisi Econòmica (UAB) and Institut d'Anàlisi Econòmica (CSIC) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Xavier Vila ().