International comparisons of Poverty Intensity: Index Decomposition and Bootstrap Inference

Kuan Xu and Lars Osberg

No 165, LIS Working papers from LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg

Abstract: This paper proposes an alternative formulation for the Sen-Shorrocks index of poverty intensity for survey data with sampling weights, and decomposes the Sen-Shorrocks index into the poverty rate, the average poverty gap ratio among the poor, and the overall Gini index of poverty gap ratios. This decomposition allows the percentage change in poverty intensity to be approximated as the sum of the percentage changes in the poverty rate and average poverty gap ratio. To account for sampling variation in estimates of poverty intensity, this paper also uses the bootstrap method to compute confidence intervals in international comparisons using Luxembourg Income Study data. Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses indicate that in the early 1970s poverty intensity in Canada and the U.S. was almost indistinguishable, but in the 1970s Canadian poverty intensity decreased. Large increases in poverty intensity occurred in the 1980s in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden.

Pages: 33 pages
Date: 1997-05
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published in Journal of Human Resources 35, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 51-81

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lis:liswps:165

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