Abstract
Usually, an indirect approach for measuring deprivation or poverty is used with poverty lines. However, some studies have used a direct approach to measure deprivation or poverty. The aim of this study is improving the identification of the poor people. The central point of the concept of deprivation used is related to the opportunity to have or do something. Therefore, deprivation means an inability to get the goods, facilities and opportunities, which are usual in the household environment. Since all of the needed variables are categorical, the latent class model is used to solve this problem because it is the best model to achieve this objective.
Acknowledgements
This paper is based on analysis of the European Community Household Panel survey for Spain in 2000. The data are used with the permission of the Spanish Statistical Institute, who bears no responsibility for the analysis or interpretations presented here. The research was carried out as a part of the work of a Research Project (2PR02A102) funded by the regional government of Extremadura (Spain) and started visiting CEPS/INSTEAD (Differdange-Luxembourg) in 2000 as an IRISS visitor.
Notes
This is the method proposed by Townsend (Citation1979) and Muffels (Citation1993).
Cerioli and Zani (Citation1990), Cheli et al. (Citation1994), Cheli and Lemni (Citation1995).
For instance, when a household is asked about running water there is no difference between a lack caused by not affording it and a decided lack.
A household has arrears in ordinary payments if it has arrears in, at least, one of the following payments: rent for accommodation, mortgage, utility bills and other loan repayments.