Identifying Income and Wealth-Poor Households in the Euro Area

an article by Philip Müller (University of Göttingen, Germany) and Tobias Schmidt (Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt am Main, Germany) published in Journal of Poverty Volume 22 Issue 2 (2018)

Abstract

In this article, the authors analyze different measures of asset and income poverty using microdata for 15 Euro-Area countries from the 2010 Household Finance and Consumption Survey. The authors are particularly interested in the way in which specific definitions of income and wealth poverty affect the number and sociodemographic characteristics of poor households, as well as their portfolio composition and consumption expenditure.

The authors find that adding wealth to the poverty definition mainly influences the percentage of poor households but has a limited effect on the documented sociodemographic composition, portfolio structure, and food consumption of poor households compared to the patterns under a pure income poverty measure.

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