Distributional change, reference groups and the measurement of relative deprivation

Jacques Silber and Paolo Verme

No 136, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

Abstract: This paper attempts to explicitly integrate the idea of reference group when measuring relative deprivation. It assumes that in assessing her situation in society an individual compares herself with individuals whose environment can be considered as being similar to hers. By environment we mean the set of people with a similar set of observable characteristics such as human capital, household attributes and location. We therefore propose to measure relative deprivation by comparing the actual income of an individual with the one he could have expected on the basis of the level of these characteristics. We then aggregate these individual comparisons by computing an index of "distributional change" that compares, on a non anonymous basis, the distributions of the actual and "expected" incomes. At the difference of other approaches to relative deprivation our measure takes into account not only the difference between the actual and "expected" individual incomes but also that between the actual and "expected" individual ranks. We applied our approach to Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, using a survey which covered a period of six years (from 2000 to 2005). We then observed that our measure of deprivation, when compared to other possible measures of deprivation, had a higher correlation with the answers given by individuals in the survey we used to a question on their assessment of their housing living conditions (a higher number corresponding to a worse subjective situation).

Keywords: deprivation; reference groups; and inequality. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D63 I32 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecineq.org/milano/WP/ECINEQ2009-136.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Working Paper: Distributional change, reference groups and the measurement of relative deprivation (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inq:inqwps:ecineq2009-136

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maria Ana Lugo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).