Suchergebnisse

The Europe 2020 Strategy has formulated key policy objectives or so-called "headline targets" which the European Union as a whole and Member States are individually committed to achieving by 2020. One of the five headline targets is directly related to the key quality aspects of life, namely social inclusion; within these targets, the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Condition (EU-SILC) headline indicators atrisk-of-poverty or social exclusion and its components will be included in the budgeting of structural funds, one of the main instruments through which policy targets are attained. For this purpose, Directorate-General Regional Policy of the European Commission is aiming to use sub-national/regional level data (NUTS 2). Starting from this, the focus of the present paper is on the "regional dimension" of well-being. We propose to adopt a methodology based on the Empirical Best Linear Unbiased Predictor (EBLUP) with an extension to the spatial dimension (SEBLUP); moreover, we compare this small area technique with the cumulation method. The application is conducted on the basis of EU-SILC data from Austria and Spain. Results report that, in general, estimates computed with the cumulation method show standard errors which are smaller than those computed with EBLUP or SEBLUP. The gain of pooling SILC data over three years is, therefore, relevant, and may allow researchers to prefer this method.

"Showcasing fuzzy set theory, this book highlights the enormous potential of fuzzy logic in helping to analyse the complexity of a wide range of socio-economic patterns and behaviour. The contributions to this volume explore the most up-to-date fuzzy-set methods for the measurement of socio-economic phenomena in a multidimensional and/or dynamic perspective. Thus far, fuzzy set theory has primarily been utilised in the social sciences in the field of poverty measurement. These essays examine the latest work in this area while also exploring further applications including social exclusion, the labour market, educational mismatch, sustainability, quality of life and violence against women. The authors demonstrate that real world situations are often characterized by imprecision, uncertainty and vagueness which cannot be properly described by the classical set theory which uses a simple true-false binary logic. By contrast, fuzzy set theory has been shown to be a powerful tool for describing the multidimensionality and complexity of social phenomena. This book will be of significant interest to economists, statisticians and sociologists utilising quantitative methods to explore socio-economic phenomena."

Recent theoretical and empirical studies have concluded that in order to be accurate, poverty and deprivation must be measured within a multidimensional framework that is consistent, efficient, and statistically robust. The fuzzy sets approach to poverty measurement was developed in the early 1990s and continues to be refined by scholars of economics and sociology who find the traditional "monetary-only" indicators to be inadequate and arbitrary. This volume brings together advanced thinking on the multidimensional measurement of poverty, including the theoretical background, applications to cross-sections using contemporary European examples, and longitudinal aspects of multidimensional fuzzy poverty analysis that pay particular attention to the transitory, or impermanent, conditions that often occur during transitions to market economies.This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers and will be a useful text on poverty for advanced students in applied statistics, urban planning, economics, and sociology.Achille Lemmi is Professor of Economic Statistics at the University of Siena. His areas of interest and research include personal income distribution models, poverty and living conditions estimation and analysis, and poverty dynamics.Gianni Betti is Associate Professor of Economic Statistics at the University of Siena. His areas of interest and research include poverty and living conditions analysis, equivalence scales, small area estimation and poverty mapping.Written for:Economists, sociologists, policy-makers, and statisticians working in universities, governments, and NGOs, instructors and graduate students Keywords: Fuzzy Set ApproachMeasurementPoverty

While much is known about the situation in the labour market in the form of gender pay and earnings gaps, rather little is understood about their sequel in old age the gender pension gap. Entering the world of pensions may well signal a step backwards as far as women's independence is concerned, particularly in countries where women have earned economic independence in employment and are now being confronted by institutional frameworks presuming, encouraging or even imposing dependence. Unequal Ageing in Europe explores the gender pension gap across the member states of the European Union, plus Iceland and Norway. Employing microdata from the Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), along with data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the authors derive key facts regarding pension inequality between women and men. An intuitive indicator for a pension gender gap is derived and contrasted with equivalent indicators for pay and earnings gaps. The authors explore European diversity in a number of dimensions and benchmark their findings against equivalent findings in the US.

This paper analyses multidimensional fuzzy monetary and non-monetary deprivation in households with children by using two different definitions: households with children under 14 years old, and the EU definition of households with dependent children. Eight dimensions of non-monetary deprivation were found using 34 items from the EU-SILC 2016 survey. Dealing with subpopulations, it is essential to compute standard errors for the presented estimators. Thus, a relevant added value of the paper is fuzzy poverty measures and associated standard errors, which were also computed. Moreover, a comparison was made between the measures obtained concerning the two subpopulations across countries. With a focus on Italy, an Italian macro-region is presented.