Counting the Missing Poor in Pre-Industrial Societies

Mathieu Lefebvre, Pierre Pestieau and Gregory Ponthiere

No 2021007, LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE)

Abstract: Under income-differentiated mortality, poverty measures suffer from a selection bias: they do not count the missing poor (i.e. persons who would have been counted as poor provided they did not die prematurely). The Pre-Industrial period being characterized by an evolutionary advantage (i.e. a higher number of surviving children per household) of the non-poor over the poor, one may expect that the missing poor bias is substantial during that period. This paper aims at estimating the missing poor bias in Pre-Industrial societies, by computing the hypothetical headcount poverty rates that would have prevailed provided the non-poor did not benefit from an evolutionary advantage over the poor. Using data on Pre-Industrial England, we show that the sign and size of the missing poor bias is sensitive to the degree of downward mobility for the non-poor.

Keywords: poverty; measurement; selection effects; missing poor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22
Date: 2021-06-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-his
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Related works:
Journal Article: Counting the missing poor in pre-industrial societies (2023)
Journal Article: Counting the missing poor in pre-industrial societies (2023)
Working Paper: Counting the missing poor in pre-industrial societies (2023)
Working Paper: Counting the missing poor in pre-industrial societies (2023)
Working Paper: Counting the missing poor in pre-industrial societies (2023)
Working Paper: Counting the Missing Poor in Pre-Industrial Societies (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cor:louvco:2021007

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