Aphorisms that “rising tides raise all boats” or that material advances of the rich eventually “trickle down” to the poor are really maxims regarding the nature of stochastic processes that underlay the income/wellbeing paths of groups of individuals. This paper looks at the implications for the empirical analysis of wellbeing of conventional assumptions regarding such processes which are emplo...

Intergenerational Earnings Mobility among the Children of Canadian Immigrants We analyze the intergenerational income mobility of Canadians born to immigrants using the 2001 Census. A detailed portrait of the Canadian population is offered as are estimates of the degree of generational mobility among the children of immigrants from 70 countries. The degree of persistence as estimated in regress...

This paper represents a first attempt to gather the issues of growth “pro-poorness” andmultidimensional poverty assessments. More precisely, we suggest the use of sequential dominance procedures (Bourguignon, 1989, Atkinson, 1992, Jenkins and Lambert, 1993) to test the “pro-poorness” of observed growth spells when poverty is measured on the basis of income and some other discrete well-being att...

This paper compares the experience of poverty reduction in China and India. It finds that more than economic growth per se, what has mattered crucially is the nature of the growth: whether it is associated with growing inequalities that do not allow the benefits of growth to reach the poor; whether the structural change involved in the growth process generates sufficient opportunities for produ...

Measuring Richness and Poverty: A Micro Data Application to Europe and Germany In this paper, we define a new class of richness measures. In contrast to the often used headcount, these new measures are sensitive to changes in rich persons’ income and therefore allow for a more sophisticated analysis of richness. We demonstrate the application of these new measures to analyze the development of ...

Data Issues and Databases Used in Analysis of Growth, Poverty and Economic Inequality This paper focuses on the importance data issues to the analysis of growth, poverty and economic inequality. We introduce a number of major databases frequently used in applied research on growth, poverty and global and international inequality. A discussion of data quality, data consistency, variable definiti...

We study absolute income poverty measurement when agents differ in preferences and face different prices. The difficulty arising from price heterogeneity is typically solved using equivalent income, but the choice of the reference price vector remains arbitrary. We provide a way to solve this arbitrariness problem by making the poverty measure consistent with preferences: an agent qualifies as ...

We examine the determinants of low income transitions using first-order Markov models that control for initial conditions effects (those found to be poor in the base year may be a nonrandom sample) and for attrition (panel retention may also be non-random). Our econometric model is a form of endogeneous switching regression, and is fitted using simulated maximum likelihood methods. The estimate...

In this paper, our overall goal is to understand how effective access to infrastructure is in reducing poverty in PNG. To meet this goal, we examine poverty in PNG, and seek to show the relationship between poverty and access to infrastructure and then identify the determinants of poverty. In our analysis, we test whether or not access to infrastructure is a significant factor in a household's ...

In applied welfare economics, equivalence scales for household composition and size corrections, and appropriate price de‡ators are minimum requirements to perform interhousehold comparisons of welfare, measured via household income or consumption information. In practice, the information available is insu¢cient and only approximate price or household composition corrections are available. Pove...