This study relies on a linear programming model to estimate welfare ratios in Spain between 1600 and 1800. This method is used to find the food basket that guaranteed the intake of basic nutrients at the lowest cost. The estimates show that working families in Toledo had higher welfare ratios than in those in Barcelona. In addition, the welfare ratios of Spain were always below those of London and Amsterdam. The divergence between Northern Europe and Spain started before the Industrial Revolution and increased over time.

Tony Atkinson’s death at the beginning of 2017 deprived economics of one of its leading contributors to research on public economics, inequality, poverty and the welfare state. This article focuses on his last official role, as Chair of the World Bank Commission on Global Poverty. The report of the Commission – already referred to as the Atkinson Commission – proposes a new approach to measuring and monitoring the global poverty reduction targets established as part of the Sustainable Development Goals agreed by the United Nations in 2015. Atkinson developed the framework and provided the academic impetus to the work of the Commission and wrote much of its report, assisted by comments provided by an Advisory Board of eminent experts in the field and a smaller working group of selected members. The article describes some of the main features of the report’s 21 recommendations, focusing on the measurement of poverty in both monetary and non-monetary dimensions and its attempt to draw together national and global efforts to measure and reduce poverty in all its forms. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of the new approach for Australia, which like many other developed countries has so far failed to engage actively with the debate over addressing extreme global poverty.

The use of exchange rates based on Purchasing Power Parities to compare incomes across countries and over time has now become standard practice. But there are reasons to believe that this could lead to excessively inflated incomes for poorer countries and in some cases also inflate the extent of real changes over time. Estimates of gross domestic product growth in the Chinese and Indian economies in recent years provide examples of this.

This article examines trends in social disadvantage in Australia over the decade to 2018 using two approaches: a monetary approach using poverty and a living standards approach using deprivation. We compare the two approaches, highlight their implications and assess whether the evidence produced by each is consistent with trickle-down effects. The estimates allow for variations in thresholds, the treatment of housing costs and relative and absolute measures. The findings indicate an overall decline in poverty that is dependent on the treatment of housing costs and a more consistent decline in deprivation but with little or no improvement for many experiencing poverty or deprivation. Poverty and deprivation among unemployed households were above those for people in other labour force states throughout the period and while these differentials have narrowed, the findings suggest that trickle-down effects did not reach many of those highly disadvantaged or are subject to long delays.

This paper focuses on individuals over 50 and shows that considering persistence and low-income dynamics is essential for understanding poverty. We use administrative data for Canada from the Longitudinal and International Study of Adults. The paper shows that poverty for seniors is highly persistent and strongly depends on lifetime earnings. We show that beginning to receive a public pension implies a higher probability of exit from poverty. Public pensions thereby help to explain the lower overall incidence of poverty among the elderly. These results are confirmed in a dynamic probit model, which allows controlling for individuals' unobserved heterogeneity and state dependence. While public pensions do not eliminate poverty among older adults, they help to alleviate it by reducing persistence and increasing exit for those who are most at risk.

The debate about extending working lives in response to population ageing often overlooks the lack of employment opportunity for older adults with disabilities. Without work, their living standards depend heavily on government transfers. This study contributes to the literature on health inequalities by analysing the sources of income and poverty outcomes for people aged 50 to 64 in two liberal democratic countries yet with contrasting disability benefit contexts – Canada and the United Kingdom. This choice of countries offers the opportunity to assess whether the design of benefit systems has led the most disadvantaged groups to fare differently between countries. Overall, disabled older persons without work faced a markedly higher risk of poverty in Canada than in the UK. Public transfers played a much greater role in the UK, accounting for two-thirds of household income among low-educated groups, compared with one-third in Canada. The average benefit amount received was similar in both countries, but the coverage of disabled people was much lower in Canada than in the UK, leading to a high poverty risk among disabled people out of work. Our findings highlight the importance of income support systems in preventing the widening of the poverty-disability gap at older ages.

Subsidies to promote tree plantations have been questioned because of negative impacts of the forestry industry. Quantitative evidence on the socioeconomic impacts of afforestation subsidies or of tree plantations is elusive, mainly due to data scarcity. We assess the overall impact of a tree plantation subsidy in Chile, using our original 20-year panel dataset that includes small area estimates of poverty and the subsidy assignment at the census-district scale. We show that forestry subsidies – on average – in fact, do increase poverty. More specifically, using difference in difference with matching techniques, and instrumental variables approaches, we show that there is an increase of about 2 per cent in the poverty rate of treated localities. We identify employment as a causal mechanism explaining this finding, since we found a negative effect of tree plantations on employment, and therefore, on poverty. We suggest reassessment of the distributional effects of the forest subsidy and forestry industry.

We use microsimulation combined with a model of the COVID-19 impacts on individuals and households to obtain projections of households in destitution in the United Kingdom. The projections are estimated at two levels: aggregate quarterly for the UK, for all quarters of 2020; and annual for 2020 differentiated by region, sector and household demographics. At the aggregate level, destitution is projected to be about three times higher than the non-COVID counterfactual level in 2020Q2, as well as substantially higher than the non-COVID case for the remainder of the year. This increased destitution is initially largely due to the effect on the self-employed, and as the Furlough scheme is drawn down, also on the unemployed. Impacts upon different regions and sectors vary widely, and so do variations across different household types. The sectors particularly affected are construction and manufacturing, while London and its closely connected regions (South East and the Midlands) are most severely affected. Single adult households suffer the most, and the adverse effects increase with number of children in the household. That the effects upon youth remain high is a particularly worrying sign, and very high increases in destitution are also projected for 25–54 year olds and the elderly (75 years and older). Further, severe adverse effects are projected for sections of society and the economy where multiple impacts are coincident. Robust and sustained mitigation measures are therefore required.

The debate on the land–poverty nexus is inconclusive, with past research unable to identify the causal dynamics. We use a unique global panel dataset that links survey and census derived poverty data with measures of land ecosystems at the subnational level. Rainfall is used to overcome the endogeneity in the land–poverty relationship in an instrumental variable approach. This is the first global study using quasi-experimental methods to uncover the degree to which land improvements matter for poverty reduction. We draw three main conclusions. First, land improvements are important for poverty reduction in rural areas and particularly so for Sub-Saharan Africa. Second, land improvements are pro-poor: poorer areas see larger poverty alleviation effects due to improvements in land. Finally, irrigation plays a major role in breaking the link between bad weather and negative impacts on the poor through reduced vegetation growth and soil fertility.

Despite complex interlinkages, insights into the multifaceted relationship between environmental risks and poverty can be gained through an analysis of different risks across space, time and scale within a single context using consistent methods. Combining geo-spatial data on eight environmental risks and household survey data from 2010–2014 for the case study of Vietnam, this paper shows: (i) at the district level, the incidence of poverty is higher in high risk areas, (ii) at the household level, poorer households face higher environmental risks, (iii) for some risks the relationship with household-level consumption varies between rural and urban areas, and (iv) environmental risks explain consumption differences between households, but less so changes over time. While altogether these analyses cannot establish a causal relationship between environmental risks and poverty, they do indicate that Vietnam's poor are disproportionally exposed. Given growing pressures due to climate change, addressing such risks should be a focus of poverty reduction efforts.

Recent research documents the adverse causal impacts on health and productivity of extreme heat, which will worsen with climate change. In this paper, we assess the current distribution of heat exposure within countries, to explore possible distributional consequences of climate change through temperature. Combining survey data from 690,745 households across 52 countries with spatial data on climate, this paper suggests that the welfare impacts of added heat stress may be regressive within countries. We find: (1) a strong negative correlation between household wealth and warmer temperature in many hot countries; (2) a strong positive correlation between household wealth and warmer temperatures in many cold countries; and (3) that poorer individuals are more likely to work in occupations with greater exposure. While our analysis is descriptive rather than causal, our results suggest a larger vulnerability of poor people to heat extremes, and potentially significant distributional and poverty implications of climate change.

The Social Security Statement is the primary resource most workers prefer to use to learn about their Social Security benefits. The Social Security Administration periodically mails this and supporting documents to all workers to help them make informed decisions about when to start receiving their benefits. Understandably, the Statement provides detailed information about the worker's retirement benefit. However, these documents contain remarkably little information about the survivor benefit despite the financial importance of this particular auxiliary benefit to the widows of deceased workers in widowhood. We analyze the effect of modifications to the survivor benefit information in the Statement on benefit knowledge and expected claiming behavior of married men using an experimental survey of workers. The results provide evidence that the augmentation of this information can temporarily improve benefit knowledge and influence expected claim ages.

This paper studies the distribution of resources within families with migrant member abroad. We derive a complete collective demand system with individual Engel effects for male and female adults and children, and the respective share of resources. The focus is on migrant-sending families in Albania, where gender and inter-generational inequalities are relevant social issues. The results show that the female share of resources is substantially lower with respect to an equal distribution and do not benefit from father’s migration. Children have a larger share of resources and benefit from their fathers migration, when women maintain control over family decisions and when the proportion of female children is larger (at the detriment of women).

This paper builds a multi-generation household model of consumption, accumulation, and risk management to assess the dynamic consequences of climate risk exposure. The model incorporates long-term impacts of consumption shortfalls, induced by optimal ‘asset smoothing’ coping behavior of the vulnerable, on poverty. The analysis shows the long-term level and depth of poverty can be improved by incorporating ‘vulnerability-targeted social protection’ into a conventional social protection system. The paper further shows insurance-based vulnerability-targeted social protection dominates (in economic growth and poverty reduction measures) both in-kind transfers and asset-based vulnerability-targeted protection. We then stress test social protection mechanisms and find the relative performance of insurance-based vulnerability-targeted social protection improves when subjected to current pessimistic projections about increasing drought risk. However, if drought risk increases beyond current climate change projections, then even the vulnerability-targeted policy loses its ability to stabilize the extent and depth of poverty.

Stochastic dominance (SD) is commonly used to rank income distributions and assess social policies. The literature argues that SD is a robust criterion for policy evaluation because it requires minimal knowledge of the social welfare function. We argue that, on the contrary, SD is not a robust criterion. We do this by carefully introducing microfoundations into a model by Chu and Koo (1990) who use SD to provide support to family-planning programs aiming at reducing the fertility of the poor. We show that fertility restrictions are generally detrimental for both individual and social welfare in spite of the fact that SD holds. Our findings are an application of the Lucas’ Critique.

Social Security provides survivor benefits to lower-earning spouses of deceased workers entitled to a retirement benefit. The value of the survivor benefit depends on a number of factors including the deceased worker's claim age. We use the Health and Retirement Study and a discrete time hazard model to analyze how the claim age of married men influences the likelihood that their spouse will enter poverty in widowhood. We find that delayed claiming is associated with reduction in a widow's poverty risk. The magnitude of this relationship varies significantly with the claim age, Social Security dependence, and survivor benefit dependence.

This paper discusses some of the criticisms recently raised by Rafael Dobado-González about our work on real wages in the Americas in the long run. Although addressing a series of issues, Dobado mainly questions our use of the welfare ratio methodology to assess standards of living in colonial Spanish America. In this article we explain how, despite its limitations, this methodology provides a solid, transparent metric to compare economic development across space and time. In particular, welfare ratios present more economically relevant information on living standards than the commodity wages that Dobado prefers (Dobado González and García Montero 2014). We argue that Dobado fails to offer convincing evidence against our findings; hence, we stand by these results, which suggest that the divergence between North and Latin America began early in the colonial period.

Replying to Rafael Dobado-González’s article on living standards in Spanish America during the colonial period, we discuss the methodology and evidence published in Arroyo Abad, Davis, and van Zanden (2012).

This article considers interaction among participation in the Food Stamp Program (FSP), food security status, and the composition of food expenditures. A quadratic almost ideal demand system with a bootstrapping two-step method of estimation is applied to data from the Current Population Survey–Food Security Supplement data and used to estimate the model and account for endogeneity between the FSP participation and food insecurity. The results show that FSP participation is endogenously related with food security status and significantly affects total food expenditure and food-away-from-home expenditures.

This research uses data from the 2004 Agricultural Resource Management Survey and probit regression to examine the determinants of poverty among U.S. farm households. The findings reveal, among others, the importance of a livelihood strategy that combines participation in government programs and off-farm work in lowering poverty rates. Findings also show the importance of educational attainment of the farm operator in mitigating poverty, but only when poverty is measured on a relative rather than an absolute basis. Policy recommendations are provided in the context of these findings.