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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Using household expenditure to develop an income poverty line | | Author(s) | Peter Saunders, Jonathan Bradshaw, Michael Hirst |
| Journal title | Social Policy & Administration, vol 36, no 3, June 2002 |
| Pages | pp 217-234 |
| Keywords | Poverty ; Expenditure [elderly] ; Income [older people] ; Cost of living ; Statistics [data] ; Variance analysis ; Methodology. |
| Annotation | Income and expenditure measures are commonly used to establish poverty lines representing respectively, the availability of cash resources and standard of living approaches to measuring the extent and composition of poverty. The authors use the 1993 Family Expenditure Survey (FES) to compare these measures and how they might be combined. Although overall poverty rates are similar whichever measure is used, the relativities they imply for different types of household differ considerably. There is little overlap between income and expenditure poverty; and very few households are both income- and expenditure-poor. Poverty as constraint on choice or constrained expenditure is defined as the absence of spending on durable goods and luxury items. Using logistic regression, income thresholds associated with the observed levels of constrained expenditure are derived for different household types. Assuming all income is spent, these thresholds define a poverty line below which expenditure is severely constrained. The extent to which social assistance rates limit or prevent household expenditure is also estimated. The method illustrate the value of exploring links between income and expenditure in measuring poverty, but draws attention to the limitations of the data. (KJ/RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-020619201 A |
| Classmark | W6: J3: JF: J3C: 6C: 3YA: 3D |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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