Loughborough University
Browse
R2-Measurement and Identification of Asset-Poor Households_A Cross-National Comparison of Spain and the United Kingdom.pdf (360.48 kB)

Measurement and identification of asset-poor households: a cross-national comparison of Spain and the United Kingdom

Download (360.48 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2019-01-08, 15:53 authored by Fran AzpitarteFran Azpitarte
This paper is concerned with the analysis of the wealth dimension of poverty in developed countries, which can hardly be measured by means of the information on household income. We focus in identifying the group of households that lack enough wealth holdings to sustain them during a period of economic crisis in order to quantify asset poverty, and its demographic weight, in two industrialized countries with particularly different household demographics and saving attitudes such as Spain and the United Kingdom. Our results show that the age profile of the asset poor is remarkably similar in the two countries. In both it is individuals in households whose head is under 45 years old who are more likely to be asset poor. However, some country-specific differences also arise. For instance, the incidence of wealth poverty in the United Kingdom is about twice that of Spain. Using counterfactual analysis we find that, although the different household demographics clearly contribute importantly to this result, there remains a significant part of the asset-poverty gap which is not explained by this relevant factor.

Funding

This research was supported from the Xunta de Galicia (Programa de Estruturación de Unidades de Investigación en Humanidades e Ciencias Sociais 2006/33 and FEDER founds) and the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (SEJ2007-67911-C03-01/ECON).

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

The Journal of Economic Inequality

Volume

9

Issue

1

Pages

87 - 110

Citation

AZPITARTE, F., 2011. Measurement and identification of asset-poor households: a cross-national comparison of Spain and the United Kingdom. The Journal of Economic Inequality, 9(1), pp. 87 - 110.

Publisher

© Springer Nature

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2011

Notes

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in The Journal of Economic Inequality. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-010-9135-2

ISSN

1569-1721

eISSN

1573-8701

Language

  • en