The papers in Measurement of Poverty, Deprivation, and Social Exclusion represent the most current research on poverty, deprivation, and income mobility. They illustrate the multidimensionality of poverty that is difficult to capture in any one measure. The volume presents state-of-the-art research that is relevant to poverty academics globally. The papers use a variety of methods that measure the persistence of poverty over time and cover numerous countries and circumstances. A selection of papers focus on single countries while others include comparisons of countries. The volume begins with a set of papers that examine particular groups that are most vulnerable to poverty and deprivation in a variety of places. These include measuring the persistence of poverty of immigrant children in Scandinavian countries. Finally the volume concludes with papers that analyze the relationships of two or more measures together to further elucidate what we know if we have only one measure of poverty.

Responses to minimum income and minimum spending questions are used to produce economic well-being thresholds. Thresholds are estimated using a regression framework. Regression coefficients are based on U.S. Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data and then applied to U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) data. Three different resource measures are compared to the estimated thresholds. The first resource measure is total before-tax money income, and the other two are expenditure based. The first of these two refers to expenditure outlays and the second to outlays adjusted for the value of the service flow of owner-occupied housing (rental equivalence). The income comparison is based on SIPP data while the outlays comparisons are based on CE data. Results using official poverty thresholds are shown for comparison. This is among the earliest work in the U.S. in which expenditure outlays have been used for economic well-being determinations in combination with personal assessments, and the first time rental equivalence has been used in such an exercise. Comparisons of expenditures for various bundles of commodities are compared to the CE derived thresholds to provide insight concerning what might be considered minimum or basic. Results reveal that CE and SIPP MIQ thresholds are higher than MSQ thresholds, and resulting poverty rates are also higher with the MIQ. CE-based MSQ thresholds are not statistically different from average expenditure outlays for food, apparel, and shelter and utilities for primary residences. When reported rental equivalences for primary residences that are owner occupied are substituted for out-of-pocket shelter expenditures, single elderly are less likely to be as badly off as they would be with a strict outlays approach in defining resources.

Under the Soviet system, the Central and East European (CEE) countriesmaintained the most equal distributions of income in the world. Hence greater incomeinequality was an expected outcome of the transition from a command to a marketeconomy. Indeed, as prices were liberalized and market forces unleashed, workers withscarce skills saw their earnings rise, while others suffered severe declines in theirearnings and even unemployment

This paper reviews a procedure that is being followed in the United States of America (USA) to experimentally test and evaluate recommendations made for redefining poverty measurement in that country. The recommendations were made in 1995 by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Panel on poverty measurement. In this paper these recommendations are reviewed and the impact of implementing the recommendations on measures of inequality and poverty are examined. In conclusion, a discussion concerning possible lessons for India is provided. The recommended poverty measure (based on new measures of thresholds and resources) is examined in terms of its impact on inequality statistics, as well as poverty statistics, and results are compared to similar statistics based on the official measure. The standard Gini index, and three generalized entropy inequality measures are used to examine inequality. For the poverty analysis simple head count ratios, poverty gaps, and Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty measures are computed. Data from the 1991 U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) Interview are used to produce the thresholds, and data from the 1992 through 1997 Current Population Survey (CPS), and in some analyzes, the 1991 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), are used to define resources. The proposed measure produces a distribution of resources that is, in general, more equal than is the distribution of official income. The poverty analysis reveals that changes in the poverty rates based on the official and the experimental measures are similar over time. However, poverty as measured by the NAS measure is greater than official poverty. The experimental poverty measure yields a poverty population that looks slightly more like the total U.S. population in terms of various demographic and socioeconomic characteristics than does the current official measure.

Subjective minimum income (MIQ) and minimum spending (MSQ) are the study focus. Basic Needs Module (1995) data from the U.S. Survey of Income and Program Participation are analyzed. A regression intersection approach is used to estimate household thresholds. MIQ thresholds are higher than MSQ thresholds. Both are higher than U.S. official poverty thresholds, and thresholds based on a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) methodology. Subjective threshold based equivalence scales imply greater economies of scale than those in the other two measures but are similar to behavioral scales. This finding suggests that families make trade-offs to meet their minimum needs.

This paper measures the change in overall net monetary income inequality during the first seven years of transition and considers the relative importance of two possible explanations for the increase in inequality: a) changes in the sources of household income, and b) changes in the household composition. Changes in the sources of household income reflect the role of the government and market during the transition period, while changes in household composition reflect social reactions to the changing economic environment. We find that the increase in inequality in labor income drove the large increase in inequality (i.e., the Gini index of household per capita income rose from 0.195 in 1988 to 0.263 in 1996). Changes in the distribution of pensions and other social payments mitigated the rise in earnings inequality, with the latter playing a more important role in reducing changes in overall income inequality over time. We show there are large shifts in the demographic composition of households over this period: far fewer households with children, far more households headed by pensioners, increases in the number of one-person households and decreases in large (five person) households. Although we find that these shifts in the demographic composition of households are increasing overall inequality, by increasing between group inequality, most of the change in inequality over time is accounted for by increase in within-group inequality. We conclude that over the first seven years of the transition labor market forces are driving changes in overall inequality in Slovakia to a much greater extent than changes in the government's social safety net or in individual's decisions about household formation.