Many authors have insisted on the necessity of defining poverty as a multidimensional concept rather than relying on income or consumption expenditures per capita. Yet, not much has actually been done to include the various dimensions of deprivation into the practical definition and measurement of poverty. Existing attempts along that direction consist of aggregating various attributes into a single index through some arbitrary function and defining a poverty line and associated poverty measures on the basis of that index. This is merely redefining more generally the concept of poverty, which then essentially remains a one dimensional concept. The present paper suggests that an alternative way to take into account the multi-dimensionality of poverty is to specify a poverty line for each dimension of poverty and to consider that a person is poor if he/she falls below at least one of these various lines. The paper then explores how to combine these various poverty lines and associated one-dimensional gaps into multidimensional poverty measures. An application of these measures to the rural population in Brazil is also given with poverty defined on income and education.

The Measurement of Multidimensional Poverty

Recent theoretical advances have brought income and wealth distributions back into a prominent position in growth and development theories, and as determinants of specific socio-economic outcomes, such as health or levels of violence. Empirical investigation of the importance of these relationships, however, has been held back by the lack of sufficiently detailed high quality data on distributions. Household surveys that include reasonable measures of income or consumption can be used to calculate distributional measures, but at low levels of aggregation these samples are rarely representative or of sufficient size to yield statistically reliable estimates. At the same time, census (or other large sample) data of sufficient size to allow disaggregation either have no information about income or consumption, or measure these variables poorly. This note outlines a statistical procedure to combine these types of data to take advantage of the detail in household sample surveys and the comprehensive coverage of a census. It extends the literature on small area statistics (Ghosh and Rao (1994), Rao (1999)) by developing estimators of population parameters that are nonlinear functions of the underlying variable of interest (here unit level consumption), and by deriving them from the full unit level distribution of that variable. In examples using Ecuadorian data, our estimates have levels of precision comparable to those of commonly used survey based welfare estimates—but for populations as small as 15,000 households, a ‘town.’ This is an enormous improvement over survey based estimates, which are typically only consistent for areas encompassing hundreds of thousands, even millions, of households. Experience using the method in South Africa, Brazil, Panama, Madagascar, and Nicaragua suggest that Ecuador is not an unusual case (Alderman et al. (2002), and Elbers et al. (2002)).

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Micro-Level Estimation of Poverty and Inequality

The rural non-farm economy: prospects for growth and poverty reduction

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The role of agriculture in economic development

This article empirically examines the patenting behavior of new biotechnology firms that have different litigation costs. I show that firms with high litigation costs are less likely to patent in subclasses with many other awards, particularly those of firms with low litigation costs. This pattern is consistent with the literature on costly litigation, which suggests that firms that have high litigation costs will take greater precautions to avoid litigation. These results are robust to a variety of control variables and modifications that seek to test alternative explanations.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/725693.pdf

Patenting in the Shadow of Competitors

The rural non-farm sector: issues and evidence from developing countries

We discuss the use of imputed data in regression analysis, in particular the use of highly disaggregated welfare indicators (from so-called 'poverty maps'). We show that such indicators can be used both as explanatory variables on the right-hand side and as the phenomenon to explain on the left-hand side. We try out practical ways of adjusting standard errors of the regression coefficients to reflect the error introduced by using imputed, rather than actual, welfare indicators. These are illustrated by regression experiments based on data from Ecuador. For regressions with imputed variables on the left-hand side, we argue that essentially the same aggregate relationships would be found with either actual or imputed variables. We address the methodological question of how to interpret aggregate relationships found in such regressions. © Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserved.

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Imputed Welfare Estimates in Regression Analysis

/pdf/poverty-and-inequality-in-brazil-new-estimates-from-combined-3eo2zu959i.pdf

Poverty and Inequality in Brazil: New Estimates from Combined PPV-PNAD Data 1

A model of patent infringement is developed to analyze the relationship between litigation and aspects of the legal environment such as the probability that the patent is found valid, the size of legal fees and their allocation across agents. Potential challengers first decide whether to infringe and then the patentee decides whether or not to prosecute. The outcome of this game has a fundamental impact on the value of patent protection to a patentee. This model is then linked to a patent renewal model which explicitly incorporates the legal parameters of interest from the litigation game. Estimates of the renewal model allow the empirical estimation of the private value of a patent protection. Simulations are presented for Germany which show the quantitative impact of changes in the legal environment on the value generated by the patent system and hence the incentives created for innovation.

/pdf/economic-consequences-of-a-changing-litigation-environment-54ck1ssz13.pdf

Jean O. Lanjouw

Papers

The rural non-farm sector: issues and evidence from developing countries

Imputed Welfare Estimates in Regression Analysis

Poverty and Inequality in Brazil: New Estimates from Combined PPV-PNAD Data 1

Economic Consequences of a Changing Litigation Environment: The Case of Patents

Economic Consequences of a Changing Litigation Environment: The Case of Patents