Resources, Deprivation and the Measurement of Poverty

Abstract

Ringen has advocated the use of both income and deprivation criteria in identifying those excluded from society due to lack of resources, a widely accepted definition of poverty. We illustrate with Irish data how this might be done, paying particular attention to how appropriate indicators of deprivation are to be selected. The results show that employing both income and deprivation criteria rather than income alone can make a substantial difference to both the extent and composition of measured poverty. This highlights the restrictive nature of poverty conceived in terms of exclusion rather than minimum rights to resources.

Targeting Poverty: Lessons from Monitoring Ireland's National Anti-Poverty Strategy

“…Elsewhere we have employed a variety of other equivalence scales to test the sensitivity of the results, including one giving a value of 0.6 to each extra adult and 0.4 to each child (often used in UK research), and one giving a value of 0.7 to each extra adult and 0.5 to each child (the so-called OECD scale). The main findings reported here hold across this range of scales (see Callan et al, 1996). Table 2 shows that, despite the buoyant economic situation between 1987 and 1997, the percentage of households below the relative income lines increased over the period, consistently from the 40 per cent up to the 60 per cent line.…”

“…(Sharing in Progress, 1997, p. 3) This has much in common with the influential formulation produced by Peter Townsend (1979), and with the definition adopted by the European Council of Ministers in 1984 referring to exclusion from the minimum acceptable way of life in the member state in which one lives. 1 The specific measure of poverty incorporated in the NAPS global target relates to those both below relative income lines and experiencing 'basic deprivation', as measured by various non-monetary indicators in research carried out at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) (Callan et al, 1993;Nolan and Whelan, 1996). Studies by the ESRI and others show that Ireland has relative income poverty rates rather higher than the more prosperous European Union members, lower than Greece or Portugal, but now quite similar to the UK rates given the dramatic increases there since 1979 (Nolan and Maître, 1999).…”

“…The 1997 sample was weighted along a number of dimensions to account for attrition among the original sample and the addition of new individuals and households (where households in the original sample split or join new households) in the period between 1994 and 1997 (the 1997 data comprised 2,945 households containing 6,868 individuals). A full description of the 1987 and 1994 surveys can be found in Callan et al (1989) and Callan et al (1996) respectively. A detailed examination of the possible effects of attrition on the representativeness of the Living in Ireland Survey has also shown that the data remain a reliable national sample of households and individuals once the appropriate weights have been applied (Watson and Healy, 1999).…”

Income, Deprivation, and Economic Strain. An Analysis of the European Community Household Panel

“…We take as our point of departure findings for Ireland showing that the relationship between income and deprivation is weaker there than widely assumed, as well as the importance of taking into account the way non-monetary indicators cluster systematically into different dimensions of deprivation (Callan et al 1993 . In this paper we examine how far these conclusions about income and deprivation can be generalised to other European Union countries, using data on twelve countries from the first wave of the ECHP.…”

Une nouvelle mesure pour analyser la pauvreté au Québec : l’indice synthétique de pauvreté-richesse

“…Les chercheurs ne s'entendent pas sur la meilleure façon de mesurer le phénomène de la pauvreté (Goedhart, Halberstadt et van Praag, 1977;Gréer et Thorbeck 1984;Ringen, 1987;Hagenaars, 1987;Hagenaars et de Vos, 1988 ;Foster et Shorrocks, 1 991 ;Callan, Nolan et Whelan, 1993;Alcock, 1993). Ces désaccords viennent du fait qu'il existe des définitions différentes de ce phénomène social, mais aussi de ce que les mesures proposées poursuivent des objectifs qui ne sont pas les mêmes (Marklund, 1990;Lesemann, 1995).…”