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The low income gap: a new indicator based on a minimum income standard

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posted on 2020-01-03, 14:51 authored by Donald Hirsch, Matt PadleyMatt Padley, Juliet StoneJuliet Stone, Laura ValadezLaura Valadez

In many high-income countries, governments seek to ensure that households at least have sufficient incomes to afford basic essentials such as food and clothing, but also to help citizens reach socially acceptable living standards allowing full participation in society. Their success in doing so is commonly monitored in terms of how many citizens are below a poverty line set relative to median income, and by how far below it they fall (the ‘poverty gap’). Yet the threshold below which this gap starts to be measured is arbitrary, begging the question of what level of low income needs addressing. A more ambitious measure, presented in this paper, considers the extent to which people fall short of a benchmark representing a socially agreed minimum standard. This ‘low income gap’ can be used to represent the distance a society has to go to eliminate income that is undesirably low. The paper presents the indicator, its meaning and some recent trends in the United Kingdom, where the methodology behind the indicator has been pioneered. The results demonstrate that this empirically derived benchmark has the potential to be of value in other countries, in assessing whether they are making progress in reducing low income.


Funding

Joseph Rowntree Foundation

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Research Unit

  • Centre for Research in Social Policy (CRSP)

Published in

Social Indicators Research

Volume

149

Pages

67 - 85

Publisher

Springer Verlag

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Acceptance date

2019-12-09

Publication date

2020-02-13

Copyright date

2020

ISSN

0303-8300

eISSN

1573-0921

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Donald Hirsch Deposit date: 20 December 2019

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