hh-poverty-comps

Introduction

This creates international comparisons of market and post transfer household poverty rates by household type (partner, children status) for use with LIS micro-data. A blog post by M. Bruenig got me interested in playing with this data. Mike Konczal and Bryce Covert wrote another recent article regarding policy implications currently as currently applied here.

Stata code is used with the LIS Data Center's cross-country micro-data LISSY interface. Code needs to be manually adjusted for each country that is added to the list.

Data Access

You need to sign up for LIS data access for confidentiality reasons, micro-data from various countries is granted to LIS but not to individuals. Consumers are provided access to run code remotely without being granted access to the data.

You can get access to sample micro-data for local code execution here

Summary

Poverty rates are calculated and provided for a sample of countries: US, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, and the United Kingdom. The poverty rates are for the year 2010 in every country except France which is for 2005.

Three types of poverty rates are outputed for each country. (This paper on types of poverty in US was helpful in understanding coding choices)

• Market Income - Before Taxes / Transfers
• After Taxes, Social Insurance, Univ. Benefits
• After Taxes, and all Transfers

Poverty rates are calculated for these household types

• M/F Head HH Partner, w/ Children
• F Head HH no Partner, w/ Children
• F Head HH Partner, w/ Children
• F Head HH Partner, No Children
• F Head HH no Partner, No Children

The first household type should serve as a baseline for all households. It is male or female headed, partnered, with children.

Code Source

LIS provides a two part self-teaching tutorial with SAS, Stata and SPSS. Part 1 teaches you how to create poverty rates, and gini levels of different types from the micro-data, and Part 2 teaches you how to combine household and individual datasets to create descriptive statistics on household types.

I combined logic from the two parts to create poverty statistics for different types of households. The full dataset is combined, data is recoded, then subsetted by household, partner, and child status, which are used to create the various poverty definitions. Note that the code will not work for countries that use different income and tax data definitions e.g. Sweden, Japan.

Data Summary

Poverty Rate by Country / HH Type	Market Income - Before Taxes / Transfers	After Taxes, Social Insurance, Univ. Benefits	After Taxes, all Transfers
US
M/F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	21.8	20.0	18.4
F Head HH no Partner, w/ Children	38.0	34.1	23.9
F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	20.0	19.9	14.7
F Head HH Partner, No Children	18.5	16.8	15.6
F Head HH no Partner, No Children	28.0	24.3	20.8
Canada
M/F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	16.4	14.7	12.7
F Head HH no Partner, w/ Children	42.3	32.6	11.1
F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	18.3	16.7	10.0
F Head HH Partner, No Children	13.9	12.3	10.8
F Head HH no Partner, No Children	23.7	21.2	18.2
Denmark
M/F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	15.8	11.9	7.8
F Head HH no Partner, w/ Children	32.0	17.3	2.1
F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	8.8	7.4	4.0
F Head HH Partner, No Children	10.3	8.0	5.1
F Head HH no Partner, No Children	31.0	14.6	8.2
Netherlands
M/F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	12.6	9.8	7.6
F Head HH no Partner, w/ Children	35.0	30.6	5.8
F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	5.7	5.1	2.6
F Head HH Partner, No Children	7.4	5.4	4.2
F Head HH no Partner, No Children	25.3	20.5	5.8
Finland
M/F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	15.1	8.7	4.2
F Head HH no Partner, w/ Children	26.3	10.4	3.1
F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	13.3	7.4	3.9
F Head HH Partner, No Children	11.4	8.3	7.6
F Head HH no Partner, No Children	26.6	14.7	9.7
UK
M/F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	17.5	17.5	15.1
F Head HH no Partner, w/ Children	55	46.6	7.1
F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	19.6	20.2	11.5
F Head HH Partner, No Children	14.1	13.7	12.6
F Head HH no Partner, No Children	28.4	26.9	20.9
Ireland
M/F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	26.4	24.0	12.2
F Head HH no Partner, w/ Children	65.1	48.9	4.3
F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	31.1	22.3	6.5
F Head HH Partner, No Children	24.1	21.3	11.5
F Head HH no Partner, No Children	34.3	27.9	16.3
Russia
M/F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	.	18.3	17.1
F Head HH no Partner, w/ Children	.	21.6	19.5
F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	.	16.7	14.4
F Head HH Partner, No Children	.	19.1	18.4
F Head HH no Partner, No Children		15.3	14.2
Poland
M/F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	22.6	11.7	10.8
F Head HH no Partner, w/ Children	30.4	20.0	6.4
F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	20.5	14.0	9.7
F Head HH Partner, No Children	21.2	11.3	10.6
F Head HH no Partner, No Children	26.8	13.6	11.4
France (05)
M/F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	18.2	10.8	8.7
F Head HH no Partner, w/ Children	43.3	22.6	3.7
F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	21.7	9.4	6.1
F Head HH Partner, No Children	16.8	8.9	7.8
F Head HH no Partner, No Children	23.7	17.0	9.5
Germany
M/F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	13.1	12.0	9.6
F Head HH no Partner, w/ Children	48.0	34.6	4.5
F Head HH Partner, w/ Children	11.4	8.4	4.2
F Head HH Partner, No Children	9.0	6.5	5.4
F Head HH no Partner, No Children	23.9	22.8	12.0

A more readable output can be found here

Additional Helpful LIS Links

List of variables

List of datasets