ArticleHumanities & social sciences communications2023
Reassessing the econometric measurement of inequality and poverty: toward a cost-of-living approach.
Article in Humanities & social sciences communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Food-related energy consumption can help reveal poverty in rural Chinese households.Nature communications · 2026Article
- How Socio-economic Inequalities Cluster People with Diabetes in Malaysia: Geographic Evaluation of Area Disparities Using a Non-parameterized Unsupervised Learning Method.Journal of epidemiology and global health · 2024Article
- The heterogeneous relationship between public health expenditures and household medical expenditures: evidence from relative poverty households in China.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
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Abstract
The econometric measurement of inequality and poverty in advanced capitalist economies has been preoccupied with aggregate measures of relative deprivation, namely, the Gini Index and a relative poverty rate, both of which are based on economic distances from the population median. Using the case of Hong Kong, this article demonstrates the limitations of relative measures: the Gini Index masks social mobility and the relative poverty line understates actual poverty. This article argues instead for a cost-of-living approach to measure poverty, where the poverty line is defined as the cost of essential goods and services. A cost-of-living approach produces a poverty line of HK$28,815 and attendant poverty rate of 44.47% in 2020, nearly double the poverty line of HK$13,450 and poverty rate of 23.6% according to the conventional relative measure of the poverty line set to 50% of median household income-capturing a shortfall of 551,400 poor households that have been overlooked by relative measures.
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