IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/wpaper/halshs-00562648.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Poverty: Looking for the Real Elasticities

Author

Listed:
  • Florent Bresson

    (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - UdA - Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

After decades of intensive research on the statistical size distribution of income and despite its empirical weaknesses, the lognormal distribution still enjoys an important popularity in the applied literature dedicated to poverty and inequality. In the present study, we emphasize the drawbacks of this choice for the calculation of the elasticities of poverty. Using last version of WIID database, we estimate the growth and inequality elasticities of poverty using 1,842 income distributions under fifteen rival distribution assumptions. Our results confirm that the lognormal distribution is not appropriate for the analysis of poverty. Most of the time, it implies an overestimation of the elasticities and bias our estimation of the relative impact of growth and redistribution on poverty alleviation.

Suggested Citation

  • Florent Bresson, 2011. "Poverty: Looking for the Real Elasticities," Working Papers halshs-00562648, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-00562648
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00562648
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00562648/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. James B. McDonald, 2008. "Some Generalized Functions for the Size Distribution of Income," Economic Studies in Inequality, Social Exclusion, and Well-Being, in: Duangkamon Chotikapanich (ed.), Modeling Income Distributions and Lorenz Curves, chapter 3, pages 37-55, Springer.
    2. Ravallion, Martin, 2001. "Growth, Inequality and Poverty: Looking Beyond Averages," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 29(11), pages 1803-1815, November.
    3. Xavier Sala-i-Martin, 2006. "The World Distribution of Income: Falling Poverty and … Convergence, Period," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 121(2), pages 351-397.
    4. Singh, S K & Maddala, G S, 1976. "A Function for Size Distribution of Incomes," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 44(5), pages 963-970, September.
    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. Ole Boysen & Alan Matthews, 2008. "The Impact of Developed Country Agricultural Trade Liberalization on Poverty: A Survey," Working Papers hal-03416399, HAL.
    2. Florent Bresson, 2010. "A general class of inequality elasticities of poverty," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 8(1), pages 71-100, March.
    3. Misselhorn, Mark & Klasen, Stephan, 2006. "Determinants of the Growth Semi-Elasticity of Poverty Reduction," Proceedings of the German Development Economics Conference, Berlin 2006 15, Verein für Socialpolitik, Research Committee Development Economics.

    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. Maxim Pinkovskiy & Xavier Sala-i-Martin, 2009. "Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income," NBER Working Papers 15433, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Dickens, Richard & Machin, Stephen & Manning, Alan, 1998. "Estimating the effect of minimum wages on employment from the distribution of wages: A critical view," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 5(2), pages 109-134, June.
    3. Dalgaard, Carl-Johan & Erickson, Lennart, 2009. "Reasonable Expectations and the First Millennium Development Goal: How Much Can Aid Achieve?," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 37(7), pages 1170-1181, July.
    4. Schluter, Christian & van Garderen, Kees Jan, 2009. "Edgeworth expansions and normalizing transforms for inequality measures," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 150(1), pages 16-29, May.
    5. van den Berg, Gerard J., 2007. "On the uniqueness of optimal prices set by monopolistic sellers," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 141(2), pages 482-491, December.
    6. Vladimir Hlasny & Paolo Verme, 2022. "The Impact of Top Incomes Biases on the Measurement of Inequality in the United States," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 84(4), pages 749-788, August.
    7. Vladimir Hlasny, 2021. "Parametric representation of the top of income distributions: Options, historical evidence, and model selection," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(4), pages 1217-1256, September.
    8. Michał Brzeziński, 2013. "Parametric Modelling of Income Distribution in Central and Eastern Europe," Central European Journal of Economic Modelling and Econometrics, Central European Journal of Economic Modelling and Econometrics, vol. 5(3), pages 207-230, September.
    9. Camelia Minoiu & Sanjay Reddy, 2014. "Kernel density estimation on grouped data: the case of poverty assessment," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 12(2), pages 163-189, June.
    10. Masato Okamoto, 2014. "Interpolating the Lorenz Curve: Methods to Preserve Shape and Remain Consistent with the Concentration Curves for Components," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 60(2), pages 349-384, June.
    11. Peter Grösche & Carsten Schröder, 2014. "On the redistributive effects of Germany’s feed-in tariff," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 46(4), pages 1339-1383, June.
    12. Jos'e Miguel Flores-Contr'o, 2024. "The Gerber-Shiu Expected Discounted Penalty Function: An Application to Poverty Trapping," Papers 2402.11715, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2024.
    13. Jose Maria Sarabia & Francisco Azpitarte, 2012. "On the relationship between objective and subjective inequality indices and the natural rate of subjective inequality," Working Papers 248, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    14. Cowell, Frank A. & Flachaire, Emmanuel, 2007. "Income distribution and inequality measurement: The problem of extreme values," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 141(2), pages 1044-1072, December.
    15. Dorothée Boccanfuso & Bernard Decaluwé & Luc Savard, 2008. "Poverty, income distribution and CGE micro-simulation modeling: Does the functional form of distribution matter?," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 6(2), pages 149-184, June.
    16. Vladimir Hlasny & Paolo Verme, 2018. "Top Incomes and Inequality Measurement: A Comparative Analysis of Correction Methods Using the EU SILC Data," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 6(2), pages 1-21, June.
    17. Loek Groot & Daan Linde, 2016. "Income inequality, redistribution and the position of the decisive voter," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 14(3), pages 269-287, September.
    18. Sung Y. Park & Anil K. Bera, 2018. "Information theoretic approaches to income density estimation with an application to the U.S. income data," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 16(4), pages 461-486, December.
    19. Fackler, Paul L. & King, Robert P., 1987. "The Evaluation of Probability Distributions with Special Emphasis on Price Distributions Derived from Option Premiums," Regional Research Projects > 1987: S-180 Annual Meeting, March 22-25, 1987, San Antonio, Texas 272343, Regional Research Projects > S-180: An Economic Analysis of Risk Management Strategies for Agricultural Production Firms.
    20. P. Jenkins, Stephen & Biewen, Martin, 2002. "Accounting for poverty differences between the United States, Great Britain and Germany," ISER Working Paper Series 2002-14, Institute for Social and Economic Research.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    cerdi;

    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:hal:wpaper:halshs-00562648. 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: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.