Studying poverty over time: an analysis by gender and age in Europe

Abstract

This paper aims to communicate a new conceptualization of persistent poverty used to build the class of longitudinal poverty indices by Mendola et al.(2011), and to show how these indices could be helpful in analyzing the characteristics of persistence of poverty among generations. The indices are based upon the idea that the longer the sequence of consecutive high poverty gaps is, the worse the situation experienced. Moreover they introduce, via a parameter, the idea that the evaluation of the individual experiences of poverty must take into account the poverty mobility in the society. An empirical application on European Community Household Panel data compare the contributions of each generation to the overall index in Europe and allows to understand the effects of some demographic characteristics on persistence of poverty.