Macroeconomic Fundamentals of Poverty and Deprivation: An Empirical Study for Developed Countries

This study provides a relevant contribution to literature on the macroeconomic determinants of multidimensional deprivation in developed countries; this type of analysis is not as frequent in the literature as that explaining poverty stricto sensu. After a review of the macroeconomic mechanisms of poverty, we propose a composite index to capture multidimensional poverty as to allow a comparative assessment of deprivation across European Union countries. Relying on the macroeconomic transmission mechanisms that influence poverty, a panel data econometric approach is implemented to study the relation between the proposed composite index and macroeconomic variables. Results show that a multidimensional poverty concept is relevant for assessing deprivation in Europe and that the dynamics of main macroeconomic variables crucially affect deprivation performances. The latter result is robust, holding for different poverty measures.