Drawing the poverty line: do regional thresholds make a difference?

• Autores: Luis Ayala Cañón, Antonio Jurado Málaga, Antonio Jesús Pérez Mayo
• Localización: XIX Encuentro de Economía Pública: Políticas Públicas para la salida de la crisis, 2012, ISBN 978-84-695-1574-7, pág. 2
• Idioma: español
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• Dialnet Métricas: 2 Citas
• Resumen

  • This paper tests the extent to which poverty measures are sensitive to alternative ways for adjusting national lines by cost-of-living differences using data from Spanish regions. We discuss how sensitive are regional poverty measures to alternative thresholds using different adjustments for differences in prices. First, we analyze how moving from national to regional poverty lines impacts the incidence and depth of national poverty. Second, we try to show how poverty patterns vary with these alternative definitions of poverty thresholds. Our results show that regional levels of poverty change with each threshold and the orderings of regions do not remain robust to the choice of poverty lines. The regional distribution of poverty changes radically when region-specific instead of national poverty lines are used. We also show that the large difference observed when a regionalspecific instead of a national poverty line is used is mainly due to re-rankings among regions. A second important finding is that poverty profiles vary as different lines are used. Standard tests for the equality of coefficients show that these effects especially differ in the case of regional variables and when incomes are adjusted taking into account housing costs and imputed income