Poverty in the Czech Republic: unemployment, pensions, and regional differences

Living standards, poverty and inequality in the UK: 2021

China's poverty reduction miracle and relative poverty: Focusing on the roles of growth and inequality

Scholars emphasize that poverty in Britain has risen sharply since the late 1970s. Meanwhile in the United States, both official figures and traditional poverty scholars report sharp declines in poverty. We seek to provide a comparison of poverty levels in Britain and the US based on a set of common definitions. We then proceed to ask what factors-demographic, economic, or policy-account for the observed changes in poverty in the two nations and what role could policy play in reducing poverty? We develop a procedure that allows one to trace out the relative impacts of altered demographics, rising wage inequality, work changes, and policy innovations in explaining changing poverty patterns. We find that the forces influencing poverty differ between nations and across absolute and relative poverty measures. Demographic and wage change is a dominant force in both nations. Britain has experienced a dramatic rise in workless households while the US has simultaneously had a sharp fall. These differences had a sizable impact on absolute poverty in both nations and a significant impact on relative poverty in Britain. Government benefits directly reduced relative and absolute poverty considerably in Britain over this period but had little impact in the US. However, changing patterns of benefits and work suggest that policy changes have significantly increased work in the US, particularly among single parents. In Britain, policy changes may have had the reverse effect, reducing work among many groups. The UK government has committed itself to reducing child poverty by half over the next 10 years and to its abolition within 20 years, largely through policy changes designed to make work pay. We conclude that any purely work-based strategy, which doesn't tackle demographics and wage dispersion, may not have a dramatic effect on relative poverty.

Poor oral health is a public health issue in the United States, disproportionately affecting people in poverty. This cross-sectional study investigates the impact of reducing absolute and relative poverty on the prevalence of periodontitis, caries, and dental pain among US adults. Data from 13,139 adults aged 30 to 70 y who completed dental examinations in the 2011–2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys were used. Periodontitis and dental caries outcomes were assessed with the 2011–2014 surveys (n = 6,563). Assessment of absolute and relative poverty was based on the poverty income ratio established by the US Census Bureau. Hypothetical counterfactual scenarios were emulated to assess the impact of poverty reductions (10%, 25%, and 50%) on periodontitis, dental caries, and dental pain. A targeted minimum loss–based estimator was used to estimate the outcomes under each scenario adjusted for age, sex, race, comorbidity, and marital status. Reductions in absolute and relative poverty were associated with a lower prevalence of oral disease. A 50% reduction in absolute poverty would avert 1.1 million cases of periodontitis, 0.4 million individuals with dental caries, and 0.6 million dental pain cases. A similar reduction in relative poverty would avert 5.4 million cases of periodontitis, 3.8 million individuals with caries, and 2 million cases of dental pain. The greatest impact was seen with a 50% relative poverty reduction: 12% reduction in periodontitis (prevalence ratio [PR], 0.88; 95% CI, 0.85 to 0.92), 13% reduction in caries (PR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.81 to 0.92), and 18% reduction in frequent dental pain (PR, 0.82; 95% CI, 0.73 to 0.91). These findings highlight the potential of poverty reduction, especially relative poverty, to significantly lower the US oral disease burden and emphasize policy importance for reducing income inequality to achieve equitable oral health.

Poverty is a bitter reality, that there is no way to escape from it in all over the history and among all nations it has been observed in intensity or weakness. Although in past centuries due to less production and revenue of communities and classified system governance, poverty has become to a naturally and obvious phenomenon, but nowadays with stunning improvements in the field of science and technology and usage of new tools and increasing production and creating new employment opportunities in most of communities, it is expected to poverty situation improves year by year and poverty percentage will decrease. In this paper, absolute and relative poverty situation have been evaluated in Iran in different years and for this purpose official government statistics were taken. In terms of the impact on type of income distribution on relative and absolute poverty, by using analytical coefficient from income distribution have been provided, and to evaluating poverty situation in different regions of country, developed degree of provinces have calculated in two time periods and level of provinces development was determined. To provide relatively complete image of provinces status human development indicators and health indicators were used. The study was indicated that during past years, absolute poverty level has reduced obviously but reduction in relative poverty hasn't been much significant, that it can representing the failure of government policies in equitable distribution of incomes and reduce in degree of inequality. (Despite spending enormous costs, support from poor people in various supporting organizations).On the other hand, rank and position of humans have been changed in terms of developing in different years, so that the rank of some provinces has been better prominently, and others have faced with descend of rank and status. It seems that developing and construction policies of government and injection of public resources are effectively in this among.

Relative poverty and absolute poverty are often seen to be very distinct concepts and seldom discussed together. While absolute poverty is seen to be about existential threats, relative poverty is understood to be about economic inequality only. One is an issue of basic rights then and the other a question of justice or fairness. But in this picture it becomes incomprehensible why the same concept is used for so different issues. This article tries to show that relative and absolute poverty do have something very important in common. Both concepts are about not having enough goods in order to be able to life a decent life, i.e. a life in dignity. While absolute poverty indicates that someone does not have enough goods to live a decent life under any circumstances, relative poverty indicates that someone does not have enough goods to live a decent life in a given society. So understood poverty in both cases is a violation of human dignity.

This study examines associations between poverty, measured as absolute or relative poverty, and children’s test scores using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data to determine (1) whether adverse influences of poverty on test scores would be similar by relative versus absolute guidelines and (2) whether this would become greater as children grow older. After variable selection and data alignment, corresponding to children’s ages, this study used a linear mixed model including both fixed and random effects. The gaps (marginal mean difference) between poor and non-poor increase when measured for absolute poverty than for relative poverty (Beta-coefficients for absolute poverty, −1.99 and −2.26 and relative poverty, −0.71 and −0.96, for math and reading, respectively). Early test scores (5–6) are positively associated with scores measured at later ages (elven to twelve years). Race/ethnicity, maternal education and cognitive test scores, family support, number of children, and birth year were shown to impact children’s scores. The official definition of absolute poverty in the USA determines eligibility for government means-tested assistance programs. The eligibility requirement should be increased to match the relative poverty line by allocating at least the same amount per person for each child equal to an adult and by adjusting marginally increased amount for older children.

Poverty is a complex issue that involves more than just income levels, affecting various aspects of life such as health, education, and living conditions. The ongoing discussion about how to measure poverty, whether through absolute or relative terms, reflects the challenges in assessing it. Absolute poverty is based on a set standard that focuses on meeting basic needs for survival, while relative poverty looks at income disparities within a society. This study explores existing research on multidimensional poverty and examines the debate between absolute and relative poverty measures, considering their respective advantages and disadvantages. A notable conclusion from the research is that multidimensional poverty indices (MPIs), like the Multidimensional Poverty Index, provide a broad view of deprivation by including multiple factors. MPIs help policymakers design more targeted interventions in areas such as education, healthcare, and living standards. However, absolute poverty measures, such as the World Bank’s $1.90-per-day threshold, are still essential for tracking extreme poverty in developing nations, offering a clear benchmark for international comparisons. In contrast, relative poverty measures are particularly relevant in wealthier nations, where inequality and social exclusion are more prominent factors in poverty. This study highlights gaps in how these different approaches are integrated and calls for further research to improve models that address both absolute and relative poverty. The findings suggest that combining multidimensional, absolute, and relative poverty measures is important for fully understanding poverty and creating effective strategies to reduce it, adapted to the needs of specific regions and contexts.

The notion of ‘poverty’ is diversified and dynamic. It varies across countries with different socio-economic norms. It may also change over time even in the same society, with different stages of social and economic development. A country may be struggling with absolute poverty at the early stages of development, while it may well be more concerned with relative and/or subjective poverty as its average per-capita income increases. This article intends to conduct an exploration of multiple poverty measures by looking into the absolute, relative and subjective poverty incidence in Indonesia. Using the 2005 National Socio-Economic Survey (Susenas), we observed that there was a roughly 28 percentage-point difference in the poverty headcount ratios computed by applying absolute (14.47%) and subjective (42.03%) poverty. There were virtually no correlations among the poverty rankings in the provinces of Indonesia obtained by five poverty metrics. Results of logit model and ordered logit model estimations of the possible determinants of poverty indicate that the main determinants of poverty are educational attainment, number of household members, physical assets (land and house ownership), existence of migrant workers (possible remittances), negative shocks of layoffs and/or health problems, development of public services, and the availability of road infrastructure. A higher educational attainment increases the probability of never being poor in any of the five poverty metrics by almost 11 percentage points. This study also confirmed that households having less than society’s averages in terms of the physical asset of land and consumption of durable goods and fashion tended to subjectively asses themselves as poor. The study suggests that any poverty alleviation programs should consider relative impacts among beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries within each locality and across provinces.

We provide a comparison of poverty levels in Britain and the US based on a set of common definitions. We then ask what factors u demographic, economic, or policy u account for the observed changes in poverty in the two nations and what role could policy play in reducing poverty? We find that the forces influencing poverty differ between nations and across absolute and relative poverty measures. Demographic and wage change is a dominant force in both nations. Government benefits reduced relative and absolute poverty considerably in Britain over this period but had little impact in the US. However, policy changes may have significantly increased work in the US, particularly among single parents, whereas in Britain they may have had the reverse effect. The UK government has committed itself to reducing child poverty by half over the next 10 years and to its abolition within 20 years. We conclude that any purely work-based strategy, which doesn''t tackle demographics and wage dispersion, may not have a dramatic effect on relative poverty.

Absolute poverty can be thought of as a condition of ‘insufficiency’, i.e. the inability to acquire the basic necessities of life. Relative poverty can be thought of as a condition of ‘inequality’. At the World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995, all participants made a commitment to produce official measures of both absolute and relative poverty and to strive to eradicate absolute poverty within a reasonable time frame. Despite these commitments, measures of absolute poverty are rare in the developed world. This paper concludes that both kinds of measures are needed for intelligent discussions and good policy‐making.

This paper examines the relationship between crime rates and aggregate economic conditions for 57 small social areas. The principal analyses address a continuing controversy—are community crime rates associated with absolute poverty, relative poverty (i.e., income inequality), or both. Using victimization data from 57 small residential neighborhoods, the analyses examine the association between absolute and relative poverty and rates of violent crime and burglary. The findings indicate that absolute poverty is more strongly associated with neighborhood crime rates, although the relationship is conditional on the type of crime considered. The implications of the findings are discussed within a perspective of community social control.

This paper illustrates that questionnaire design significantly affects estimates of household consumption and absolute poverty. In a between-groups designed experiment in El Salvador, longer, more detailed questions on consumption result in an estimate of mean, household consumption that is 31 percent greater than the estimate derived from a condensed version of the questionnaire. The distribution of household consumption from the long questionnaire first-order stochastically dominates the distribution from the short questionnaire over 96 percent of the range of the distribution. This difference in estimated consumption results in a measure of absolute, severe poverty from the short questionnaire that is 46 percent greater than the estimate derived from the long questionnaire. In contrast, the level of relative poverty is unaffected by the changes in questionnaire design. An implication of this paper is that modifications over time to questionnaires will result in spurious estimates of change in consumption and absolute poverty levels.

China has made great achievements in anti-poverty in recent years. With the elimination of absolute poverty, relative poverty will become the future poverty alleviation task in China. From the experience of various countries, fiscal instruments are an important means to solve relative poverty, but the role of fiscal instruments in solving relative poverty in China is worth discussing. From the perspectives of taxation and public transfers, using the CFPS2012 micro data and taking 40%, 50% and 60% of the median income of sample as the relative poverty line, this paper analyzes the relative poverty reduction, income redistribution, fiscal impoverishment and gains of China’s fiscal instruments, and compares the policy performance under the absolute poverty and relative poverty standard. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis and scenario simulation are carried out in this paper through the reclassification of pension, adjustment of income equivalent scale treatment and policy redesign. This paper draws the following conclusions: First, the relative poverty status of the whole sample and the rural sample has been improved after taxes and transfers. However, the relative poverty of the urban areas has increased. Social security contributions and income taxes have increased relative poverty, while dibao, agricultural subsidies and subsidies for returning farmland to forests have played a large role in reducing relative poverty. Public transfers are important to reduce rural poverty. Second, income inequality has improved. The redistribution effect of government transfers is larger than that of social security payment and individual income taxes. In the urban sample, the marginal contribution of the redistribution effect of individual income taxes is larger than that in the rural sample, and the marginal contribution of transfer payments such as dibao, subsidies for returning farmland to forests, agricultural subsidies, subsidies for households with five guarantees, and subsidies for households with extreme poverty is higher than that in the urban sample. Third, the level and proportion of people who benefit from fiscal instruments are always higher than that of fiscal impoverishment. Although relative poverty and redistribution have been improved, the fiscal impoverishment may be concealed by fiscal gains. Fourth, there is consistent policy feasibility between absolute poverty and relative poverty. In the sensitivity and scenario analysis, we find that after the pension is reclassified as transfer payment, it will become an important factor to reduce relative poverty, reduce the poverty gap and improve the redistribution, and the expansion of transfer is conducive to the urban relative poverty reduction.

This study draws on the theories of Emile Durkheim and the Stream Analogy of Lethal Violence to examine the effect of poverty on suicide rates across 15 Western European nations and the United States between 1993 and 2000. To achieve our goal, we take advantage of absolute and relative poverty measures, along with infant mortality rates, utilized in recent cross-national research on homicide rates. The results from fixed-effects regression models reveal that relative poverty rather than absolute poverty and infant mortality rates are positively related to suicide rates, net of economic development. In addition, we find relative poverty and infant mortality rates to yield significant effects on the suicide-homicide ratio and total violence rates. This study concludes with a discussion of the role of relative poverty in predicting different manifestations of lethal violence.