Metodologie per la stima degli affitti figurativi ed impatto sulla distribuzione del reddito
In the relevant literature it is well established that imputed rents – a non-monetary income source for all households whose living accommodation is not rented at a market price - has to be accounted for in order to provide a more accurate and comparable measure of the total disposable household income. A more controversial issue is about the choice among distinct estimation approaches and how to operationalise them. This paper aims to analyse the impact of different estimation methods for imputed rents on the distribution of disposable income as well as on inequality measures, using data from EUSILC. Subjective rents – self-assessed values by the respondents - are compared with predicted values coming from econometric techniques, i.e. an hedonic regression model,being both methods coherent with the ‘rental equivalence value’ approach. Three main issues are assessed: i) pros and cons of each method; ii) if the tenure discount (the length of tenure), which turns to be a relevant factor in determining the observed values of the market rents, has to be taken into explicit account in predicting imputed rents; iii) how to prevent biases on model predictions eventually arising if a selection process between tenants at a market price and households living with different accommodation occurs.
Income-Based and Consumption-Based Measurement of Absolute Poverty: Insights from Italy
Despite the debate about the introduction of an official absolute poverty line is growing in the EU, at the moment Italy is the only EU country providing an official measure of absolute poverty. Absolute poverty is estimated in Italy with reference to household consumption using the Household Budget Survey (HBS), but it can be estimated also relying on incomes. Focusing on the Italian experience, this article contributes to the literature and to the national and European policy debate about poverty measurement in three ways. First, a detailed review of the methodology adopted in Italy to compute absolute poverty is presented. Second, the article investigates what changes when absolute poverty is assessed relying on income (using EU-SILC data) instead than on consumption (using HBS). Third, a comparison between income-based absolute poverty and the two main indicators of poverty and social exclusion used at the EU level—at risk of poverty rate, AROP, and severe material deprivation index, SMD—is shown. Main findings are: (1) the level and the characteristics of the poor change when absolute poverty is measured with reference to income rather than to consumption; (2) the incidence of income-based absolute poverty has risen more steeply than the incidence of the AROP since the upsurge of the economic crisis in 2008; (3) a very low correlation at the individual level between the income-based absolute poverty status and the SMD status emerges, thus strongly questioning the idea of using SMD as a proxy of absolute poverty.
LIPRO: A Multistate Household Projection Model
This chapter describes the construction of a very general, dynamic household model called LIPRO, based on the insights of multidimensional demography, and applies this model to trace the present and the future household situation in the Netherlands. The model classifies individuals by eleven household positions, corresponding to seven household types. These household positions are specified in such a way that a projection of individuals by household position can easily be transformed into a projections of households by household type.