Poverty Growth in Scandinavian Countries: A Sen Multi-decomposition

Stéphane Mussard and Maria Pi Alperin

Cahiers de recherche from Departement d'économique de l'École de gestion à l'Université de Sherbrooke

Abstract: We show in this paper that the growth rate of the Sen index is multi-decomposable, that is, decomposable simultaneously by groups and income sources. The multi-decomposition of the poverty growth yields respectively: the growth rate of the poverty incidence (poverty rate) decomposed by groups, the growth rate of the poverty depth (poverty gap ratios) decomposed by sources and groups, and the growth rate of inequality decomposed by sources and groups. We demonstrate that the multi-decomposition is not unique. It is mainly dependent on poverty lines defined on the space of income sources. An application to Scandinavian countries shows that poverty lines based on non-correlation between the sources of incomes imply serious underestimation of the contribution levels of the different components of the global poverty growth. The main contribution of our paper is to pay a particular attention to the poverty growth and its source components in order to avoid underestimation of poverty growth.

Keywords: Gini index; Sen index; Source decomposition; Subgroup decomposition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2010-09-16
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http://gredi.recherche.usherbrooke.ca/wpapers/GREDI-1021.pdf First version, 2010 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Poverty growth in Scandinavian countries: A Sen multi-decomposition (2011)
Working Paper: Poverty Growth in Scandinavian Countries: A Sen Multi-decomposition (2010)
Working Paper: Poverty Growth in Scandinavian Countries: A Sen Multi-decomposition (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:shr:wpaper:10-21

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