Search results for "Keywords: longitudinal poverty"

The importance of consecutive spells of poverty: a longitudinal poverty index

2009

Traditional measures of poverty persistence, such as ’poverty rate’ (i.e., the number of years spent in poverty upon the total number of observations) or the ’persistent-risk-of-poverty rate’, do not devote enough attention to the sequence of poverty spells. In particular, they are insufficient in underlining the different effects associated with occasional single spells of poverty and the consecutive years of poverty. Here, we propose a new index which measures the severity of poverty, taking into account the way poverty and non-poverty spells follow one another along individual life courses. The index is normalized and increases with the number of consecutive years in poverty along the se…