IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ecolet/v120y2013i3p405-407.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Global extreme poverty rates for children, adults and the elderly

Author

Listed:
  • Batana, Yélé
  • Bussolo, Maurizio
  • Cockburn, John

Abstract

Chen and Ravallion’s estimates of global extreme poverty rates are well known. This note, by considering how these rates vary by age group, reaches two important and policy relevant conclusions and emphasizes a central avenue for future research. The first is that child extreme poverty rates are 50% higher than adult ones and almost twice those of the elderly. This result depends on assuming that all individuals in a household have the same resource needs and no economies of scale exist, as in the World Bank standard approach. Conversely, if conservative estimates of economies of scale and individual discount factors are adopted, global extreme poverty rates and the child–adult gap are much smaller than the Chen and Ravallion estimates. These findings highlight the policy importance of research efforts towards understanding how needs vary within a household and with its size.

Suggested Citation

  • Batana, Yélé & Bussolo, Maurizio & Cockburn, John, 2013. "Global extreme poverty rates for children, adults and the elderly," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 120(3), pages 405-407.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:120:y:2013:i:3:p:405-407
    DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2013.05.006
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176513002437
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.econlet.2013.05.006?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Coulter, Fiona A E & Cowell, Frank A & Jenkins, Stephen P, 1992. "Differences in Needs and Assessment of Income Distributions," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 44(2), pages 77-124, April.
    2. Lanjouw, Peter & Ravallion, Martin, 1995. "Poverty and Household Size," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 105(433), pages 1415-1434, November.
    3. Shaohua Chen & Martin Ravallion, 2010. "The Developing World is Poorer than We Thought, But No Less Successful in the Fight Against Poverty," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 125(4), pages 1577-1625.
    4. Martin Ravallion & Shaohua Chen & Prem Sangraula, 2009. "Dollar a Day Revisited," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 23(2), pages 163-184, June.
    5. Ferreira, Francisco H.G. & Ravallion, Martin, 2008. "Global poverty and inequality : a review of the evidence," Policy Research Working Paper Series 4623, The World Bank.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gindling, T.H. & Hasnain, Zahid & Newhouse, David & Shi, Rong, 2020. "Are public sector workers in developing countries overpaid? Evidence from a new global dataset," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 126(C).
    2. Ravallion, Martin, 2015. "On testing the scale sensitivity of poverty measures," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 137(C), pages 88-90.
    3. Ingutia, Rose & Rezitis, Anthony N. & Sumelius, John, 2020. "Child poverty, status of rural women and education in sub Saharan Africa," Children and Youth Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 111(C).
    4. Brown, Caitlin & Calvi, Rossella & Penglase, Jacob, 2021. "Sharing the pie: An analysis of undernutrition and individual consumption in Bangladesh," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 200(C).
    5. Newhouse, David & Suárez Becerra, Pablo & Evans, Martin, 2017. "New global estimates of child poverty and their sensitivity to alternative equivalence scales," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 157(C), pages 125-128.
    6. Bose-Duker,Theophiline & Gaddis,Isis & Kilic,Talip & Lechene,Valérie & Pendakur,Krishna, 2021. "Diamonds in the Rough? : Repurposing Multi-Topic Surveys to Estimate Individual-Level Consumption Poverty," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9661, The World Bank.
    7. Echeverría, Lucía, 2022. "Sensibilidad del análisis de la pobreza a las escalas de equivalencias. Una aplicación para Argentina," Nülan. Deposited Documents 3789, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Sociales, Centro de Documentación.
    8. Oliver Fiala & Enrique Delamónica & Gerardo Escaroz & Ismael Cid Martinez & José Espinoza-Delgado & Aristide Kielem, 2021. "Children in Monetary Poor Households: Baseline and COVID-19 Impact for 2020 and 2021," Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Springer, vol. 5(2), pages 161-176, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ravallion, Martin, 2015. "On testing the scale sensitivity of poverty measures," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 137(C), pages 88-90.
    2. Chen, Shaohua & Ravallion, Martin, 2021. "Reconciling the conflicting narratives on poverty in China," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 153(C).
    3. Imai, Katsushi S. & Gaiha, Raghav & Thapa, Ganesh & Annim, Samuel Kobina, 2012. "Microfinance and Poverty—A Macro Perspective," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 40(8), pages 1675-1689.
    4. Alkire, Sabina & Santos, Maria Emma, 2014. "Measuring Acute Poverty in the Developing World: Robustness and Scope of the Multidimensional Poverty Index," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 251-274.
    5. Guillermo Cruces, 2005. "Income Fluctuations, Poverty and Well-Being Over Time: Theory and Application to Argentina," Labor and Demography 0502007, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Ravallion, Martin, 2010. "The Developing World's Bulging (but Vulnerable) Middle Class," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 445-454, April.
    7. Sunil Kumar & Renuka Mahadevan, 2008. "Construction of An Adult Equivalence Index to Measure Intra-household Inequality and Poverty: Case Study," Discussion Papers Series 363, School of Economics, University of Queensland, Australia.
    8. Begum, Syeda Shahanara & Deng, Quheng & Gustafsson, Björn, 2012. "Economic growth and child poverty reduction in Bangladesh and China," Journal of Asian Economics, Elsevier, vol. 23(1), pages 73-85.
    9. Francisco H. G. Ferreira & Shaohua Chen & Andrew Dabalen & Yuri Dikhanov & Nada Hamadeh & Dean Jolliffe & Ambar Narayan & Espen Beer Prydz & Ana Revenga & Prem Sangraula & Umar Serajuddin & Nobuo Yosh, 2016. "A global count of the extreme poor in 2012: data issues, methodology and initial results," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 14(2), pages 141-172, June.
    10. Moatsos, Michail & Lazopoulos, Achillefs, 2021. "Global poverty: A first estimation of its uncertainty," World Development Perspectives, Elsevier, vol. 22(C).
    11. Fosu, Augustin Kwasi, 2017. "Growth, inequality, and poverty reduction in developing countries: Recent global evidence," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 71(2), pages 306-336.
    12. Wu, Alfred M. & Ramesh, M., 2014. "Poverty Reduction in Urban China: The Impact of Cash Transfers," MPRA Paper 54358, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    13. Kym Anderson & John Cockburn & Will Martin, 2011. "Would Freeing Up World Trade Reduce Poverty and Inequality? The Vexed Role of Agricultural Distortions," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 34(4), pages 487-515, April.
    14. Mussa, Richard, 2017. "Poverty in Malawi: Policy Analysis with Distributional Changes," MPRA Paper 75980, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    15. Cowell, Frank & Mercader-Prats, Magda, 1999. "Equivalence scales and inequality," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 2190, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    16. Ravallion, Martin & Chen, Shaohua, 2019. "Global poverty measurement when relative income matters," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 177(C), pages 1-1.
    17. Gallardo, Mauricio, 2010. "Nicaragua: el desafío pendiente de superación de la pobreza [Nicaragua: a pending challenge to overcome poverty]," MPRA Paper 20863, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 21 Feb 2010.
    18. Machiko, Nissanke, 2011. "International and Institutional Traps in Sub-Saharan Africa under Globalisation: A Comparative Perspective," CEI Working Paper Series 2011-6, Center for Economic Institutions, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University.
    19. Udo Ebert & Patrick Moyes, 2017. "Inequality and isoelastic equivalence scales: restrictions and implications," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 48(2), pages 295-326, February.
    20. Martin Ravallion, 2012. "Why Don't We See Poverty Convergence?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(1), pages 504-523, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Global poverty; Children; Elderly;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I3 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:120:y:2013:i:3:p:405-407. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolet .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.