Filter by...
Reset all
Publications (38)
Blog
Luc Christiaensen and Lorraine Telfer-Taivainen If a person suddenly becomes poor, for example, due to an unexpected death or illness in the family, they will have a rather different experience and understanding of poverty than someone who has been impoverished almost their entire life. Importantly...
Journal Article
Part of Journal Special Issue
Measuring Poverty Over Time
Journal Article
Part of Journal Special Issue
Measuring Poverty Over Time
Journal Article
Part of Journal Special Issue
Measuring Poverty Over Time
Journal Article
– Evidence from South Africa
Part of Journal Special Issue
Measuring Poverty Over Time
Journal Article
– Validation and Applications
Part of Journal Special Issue
Measuring Poverty Over Time
People often move in and out of poverty, and the length of time spent in poverty can vary widely, likely affecting prospects of escaping and staying out of poverty. Current poverty measures do not account for these aspects. Should they? Are there sound theoretical foundations for shifting towards...
Working Paper
pdf
Tracking poverty is predicated on the availability of comparable consumption data and reliable price deflators. However, regular series of strictly comparable data are only rarely available. Poverty prediction methods that track consumption correlates as opposed to consumption itself have been...
Working Paper
pdf
The Impact of Multiple Imputation of Coarsened Data on Estimates on the Working Poor in South Africa
South African household surveys typically contain coarsened earnings data, which consist of a mixture of missing earnings values, point responses and interval-censored responses. This paper uses sequential regression multivariate imputation to impute missing and interval-censored values in the 2000...
Working Paper
pdf
Macroeconomic instability has been increasingly considered as a factor lowering average income growth and, in this way, is a factor slowing down poverty reduction. But it can also result in slower poverty reduction for a given average rate of growth, due to poverty traps, often examined at the...
Working Paper
pdf
– Income over Time, Aspirations and Reference Groups
How a person assesses the wellbeing derived from income is often determined as much by its contrast with a reference point as by the level of income itself. In this paper, I use a household survey from Mexico to examine how subjective poverty assessments not only depend on the absolute level of...
Working Paper
pdf
We examine the measurement of individual poverty in an intertemporal context. Our aim is to capture the importance of persistence in a state of poverty and we characterize a corresponding individual intertemporal poverty measure. Our first axiom requires that intertemporal poverty is identical to...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper demonstrates the implications of adopting an approach to measuring poverty that takes into account the lifetime experience of individuals rather than simply taking a static or cross-sectional perspective. Our approach follows the theoretical innovations in Hoy and Zheng (2008) which...
Working Paper
pdf
The analysis of poverty dynamics yields important insights about the expected effectiveness of alternative social policies on poverty reduction. This paper analyses the effect of spell recurrence on poverty dynamics taking into account multiple poverty and non-poverty spells. Using longitudinal data...
Blog
Wim Naudé and James C. MacGee Globally, wealth is very unequally distributed, both within countries and between countries. The UNU-WIDER project on Personal Assets from a Global Perspective has found for instance that the richest 10 percent of adults in the world own 85 percent of global household...
From the book:
Personal Wealth from a Global Perspective
There is great media fascination in the activities and lifestyles of the super-rich. But personal wealth is also important for those of more modest means as a store of potential consumption, as a cushion against emergencies, and as collateral for business and investment loans. This book is the first...
Working Paper
pdf
There has been much recent research on the world distribution of income, but also growing recognition of the importance of other contributions to well-being, including those of household wealth. Wealth is important in providing security and opportunity, particularly in poorer countries that lack...
Working Paper
pdf
We provide the first estimate of the level and distribution of global household wealth. Mean assets and debts within countries are measured, partly or wholly, for 38 countries using household balance sheet and survey data centred on the year 2000. Determinants of mean financial assets, non-financial...
Working Paper
pdf
Housing is the single most important component of personal wealth in most countries. The special characteristics of housing markets are therefore key to understanding personal portfolios, saving, the household distribution of wealth, and the monetary transmission mechanism. This paper discusses how...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence on the Level and Distribution across Selected Countries
This paper discusses issues that arise in the comparison of estimates of wealth holdings and their distribution in light of data for selected OECD countries. We find large differences in the level of wealth, depending on whether the mean or median levels are compared across countries. Sensitivity of...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper investigates some major changes in the wealth distribution in China using the data from two national household surveys conducted in 1995 and 2002. The surveys collected rich information on household wealth and its components, enabling a detailed analysis of changes in wealth distribution...
Working Paper
pdf
All countries in transition experienced increases in inequality. They have also undertaken massive privatization of key asset housing, often on give-away terms. Are these two phenomena related? Has transfer of ownership rights to residents slowed down the inequality increases or it pushed it up...
Working Paper
pdf
The aim of this paper is to examine the concentration of wealth among the group of top wealth holders, defined as those with wealth in excess of a high cut off. The paper begins by considering the definition of this cut off, analogous to the definition of a poverty line at the other end of the...
Working Paper
pdf
Does the existence of formal title to land and real estate matter for the distribution of wealth? This paper reviews the empirical literature on the economic impact of land and real estate administration systems across countries. This paper argues that a functioning credit market for secured credit...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from Rural Ethiopia
This paper considers asset holdings in rural Ethiopia. It shows that households own mostly non-financial assets and that the composition of asset portfolios varies significantly with the household’s overall wealth and its exposure to uncertainty. As regards the distribution of assets, inequality is...
Working Paper
pdf
– Using an index of consumer durables to investigate wealth accumulation by households in Ghana
The study uses an asset index of consumer durables to track changes in household wealth in Ghana during the recent period of strong growth. Using the Ghana Living Standards Survey of 1998 that contains both wealth data and consumer durable data, the authors demonstrate that the asset index...
Working Paper
pdf
Land and wealth are closely related in rural Brazil, a country characterized by high levels of inequality in terms of income or landholdings. After presenting a historical retrospective of land concentration and land reform in Brazil, this study evaluates the impact of the land reform programme...
Working Paper
pdf
– Output, Assets and Employment
This study documents four key facts about informal economic activities: (1) the size of the informal sector varies greatly across nations; (2) this size is strongly correlated with economic development, the tax burden, and the rule of law; (3) the informal sector emphasizes small-scale, self...
Working Paper
pdf
This study discusses the evolution of personal wealth in transition economies. While data availability is still a problem, the available indirect evidence suggests privatization has resulted in an increase in personal wealth but also in personal wealth inequality, especially in the countries that...
Displaying 32 of 38 results