Counting the missing poor in pre-industrial societies
Journal article: 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 quantifies 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 and France, we show that the sign and size of the missing poor bias are sensitive to the degree of downward social mobility.
Author(s)
Mathieu Lefebvre, Pierre Pestieau, Gregory Ponthiere
Journal
- Cliometrica
Date of publication
- 2023
Keywords JEL
Keywords
- Measurement
- Selection effects
- Missing poor
- Poverty
Pages
- 155-183
URL of the HAL notice
Version
- 1
Volume
- 17