TIPs for Poverty Analysis: The Case of Spain, 1980-81 to 1990-91

Abstract

In this paper, we apply the methodology developed by Jenkins and Lambert (1997) to the study of the evolution of poverty in Spain during the 1980s. The main advantage of this approach lies in the fact that it provides poverty orderings consistent with a wide subset of generalized poverty gap poverty indices, while allowing different poverty lines for each of the distributions being compared. Our contribution focuses on two aspects. (i) We study the robustness of our results to the choice of the equivalence scale. (ii) We extend to our procedures of statistical inference which are already used in the inequality literature. The main conclusion is the unambiguous fall in poverty levesl, both in population as a whole as well as in all subgroups in the partition by household size.