IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/urbstu/v44y2007i12p2283-2303.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Re-count of Poverty in US Central Cities: Just Who and Where Are the Urban Poor?

Author

Listed:
  • Christopher Johnson

    (Department of Economics and Geography, University of North Florida, 4567 St Johns Bluff Road South, Jacksonville, Florida 32224, USA, cjohnson@unf.edu)

Abstract

Poverty remains a persistent problem in central cities across the US and the government's approach to measuring it is not without shortcomings. This paper applies recently developed innovations in poverty measurement and presents improved estimates of central-city poverty across time. A broader and more comprehensive income concept is employed to measure family resources and important distributional aspects of poverty are incorporated by using the Sen index. In general, Sen indexes for the central city are significantly reduced when comprehensive income is used to evaluate poverty. Motivating these changes are the substantial reductions that occur in the depth of poverty and the relative income inequality among poor central-city residents. Regionally, the results suggest that the elements of comprehensive income have their greatest impact on estimates of poverty in Southern central cities, while the central cities of the West are least affected.

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher Johnson, 2007. "A Re-count of Poverty in US Central Cities: Just Who and Where Are the Urban Poor?," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 44(12), pages 2283-2303, November.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:44:y:2007:i:12:p:2283-2303
    DOI: 10.1080/00420980701540929
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1080/00420980701540929
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00420980701540929?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
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Foster, James & Greer, Joel & Thorbecke, Erik, 1984. "A Class of Decomposable Poverty Measures," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 52(3), pages 761-766, May.
    2. John Bishop & John Formby & Buhong Zheng, 1999. "Distribution Sensitive Measures of Poverty in the United States," Review of Social Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 57(3), pages 306-343.
    3. Daniel B. Radner, 1997. "Noncash Income, Equivalence Scales, And The Measurement Of Economic Well‐Being," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 43(1), pages 71-88, March.
    4. Sen, Amartya K, 1976. "Poverty: An Ordinal Approach to Measurement," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 44(2), pages 219-231, March.
    5. John P. Formby & Gary A. Hoover & Hoseong Kim, 2001. "Economic Growth and Poverty in the United States," Journal of Income Distribution, Ad libros publications inc., vol. 10(3-4), pages 1-1, September.
    6. Short, Kathleen, et al, 1998. "Poverty-Measurement Research Using the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the Survey of Income and Program Participation," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(2), pages 352-356, May.
    7. Daniel Weinberg, 2005. "Alternative Measures of Income Poverty and the Anti-Poverty Effects of Taxes and Transfers," Working Papers 05-08, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    8. Bishop, John A & Formby, John P & Zheng, Buhong, 1997. "Statistical Inference and the Sen Index of Poverty," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 38(2), pages 381-387, May.
    9. Shorrocks, Anthony F, 1995. "Revisiting the Sen Poverty Index," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 63(5), pages 1225-1230, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    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. Giuseppe Pignataro & Michele Costa, 2023. "The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke index and the inequality factors: an analysis through the Gini index decomposition," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 21(2), pages 483-497, June.
    2. Chakravarty, Satya R. & Deutsch, Joseph & Silber, Jacques, 2008. "On the Watts Multidimensional Poverty Index and its Decomposition," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 36(6), pages 1067-1077, June.
    3. Duclos, Jean-Yves & Araar, Abdelkrim & Giles, John, 2010. "Chronic and transient poverty: Measurement and estimation, with evidence from China," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(2), pages 266-277, March.
    4. Davidson, Russell, 2009. "Reliable inference for the Gini index," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 150(1), pages 30-40, May.
    5. Wen-Hao Chen & Jean-Yves Duclos, 2011. "Testing for poverty dominance: an application to Canada," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 44(3), pages 781-803, August.
    6. Arthur Charpentier & Stéphane Mussard, 2011. "Income inequality games," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 9(4), pages 529-554, December.
    7. Mussard, Stéphane & Pi Alperin, Maria Noel, 2011. "Poverty growth in Scandinavian countries: A Sen multi-decomposition," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 28(6), pages 2842-2853.
    8. Edwin Fourrier-Nicolaï & Michel Lubrano, 2020. "Bayesian inference for TIP curves: an application to child poverty in Germany," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 18(1), pages 91-111, March.
    9. Zheng, Buhong, 2000. "Minimum Distribution-Sensitivity, Poverty Aversion, and Poverty Orderings," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 95(1), pages 116-137, November.
    10. Suman Seth and Gaston Yalonetzky, 2018. "Assessing Deprivation with Ordinal Variables: Depth Sensitivity and Poverty Aversion," OPHI Working Papers ophiwp123.pdf, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford.
    11. James E. Foster & Joel Greer & Erik Thorbecke, 2010. "The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) Poverty Measures: Twenty-Five Years Later," Working Papers 2010-14, The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy.
    12. Picot, Garnett & Morissette, Rene & Myles, John, 2003. "Low-income Intensity During the 1990s: The Role of Economic Growth, Employment Earnings and Social Transfers," Analytical Studies Branch Research Paper Series 2003172e, Statistics Canada, Analytical Studies Branch.
    13. Jean–Yves Duclos & Phillipe Grégoire, 2002. "Absolute and Relative Deprivation and the Measurement of Poverty," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 48(4), pages 471-492, December.
    14. Zheng, Buhong, 2001. "Statistical inference for poverty measures with relative poverty lines," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 101(2), pages 337-356, April.
    15. David (David Patrick) Madden, 2002. "A review of recent research into poverty in Ireland," Working Papers 200232, School of Economics, University College Dublin.
    16. Sreenivasan Subramanian, 2004. "Indicators of Inequality and Poverty," WIDER Working Paper Series RP2004-25, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    17. Bhattarai, Keshab, 2010. "Strategic And General Equilibrium Models In Poverty Measurement Studies," Journal for Economic Forecasting, Institute for Economic Forecasting, vol. 0(1), pages 137-150, March.
    18. Joseph Deutsch & Yves Flückiger & Jacques Silber, 2008. "On various ways of measuring unemployment, with applications to Switzerland," Research on Economic Inequality, in: Inequality and Opportunity: Papers from the Second ECINEQ Society Meeting, pages 259-284, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
    19. Ottó Hajdu, 2021. "A New Generalized Variance Approach for Measuring Multidimensional Inequality and Poverty," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 158(3), pages 839-861, December.
    20. Luis Enrique, Gutierrez Casas, 2006. "Pobreza de ingreso en CHihuahua: un análisis territorial para el período 1990-2000 [Income poverty in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico: a territorial analysis for the period 1990-2000]," MPRA Paper 11005, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    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:sae:urbstu:v:44:y:2007:i:12:p:2283-2303. 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: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/urbanstudiesjournal .

    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.