The working poor and poverty reduction in stable macroeconomic environments.

稳定宏观经济环境中的工作穷人和减贫。

• 批准号: 2274760
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Brighton
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2019 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2274760
• 关键词: working; poor; poverty; reduction; stable

Japan has no official "poverty line", and subsequently no official statistics on poverty exists (Sekine, 2008). In practice, however, economists have applied the OECD index (50% of median income), or the "minimum standard of living" approach in assessing Japan's poverty. The OECD index assesses Japan's relative poverty rate to be 15.3%, the fifth highest ratio amongst the OECD countries. The Japanese government, however, states that according to absolute measurements, there are no severe poverty issues (Yuasa, 2006). However, there are worrying sings of a fast-growing low-income population accompanied by the fact that current safety nets such as social security and public assistance have large gaps in their personal scope (Kawai and Kanno, 2006). The academic literature on comparative analysis of the working poor between Japan and other advanced economies is sparse. Murakami characterises the working poor in Japan and compares them with those in Canada (Murakami, 2011), and the UK (Murakami, 2009). The studies show that the working poor are most likely to be found among the young, those with a low level of education, unstable employment, and working for small companies. As regards to the main differences, male are more likely to belong to the working poor in western countries, and the number of working poor in the age group 25-44 is significantly lager in Japan compared to the UK and Canada. The aim of this research is to improve on several drawbacks of Murakami's statistical analysis of absolute poverty measurement. (1) Murakami (2011) revises the definition of the working poor (Iwai and Murakami, 2007) and incorporates the definition provided by the US Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS). However, the US defines poverty by a poverty line, which does not exist in Japan. This inconsistent use of definitions leads to incomparable results across countries. (2) Murakami's data set is based on the labour survey 1997 and 2002. He imposes a very simple statistical model on the data, and comparative analysis is based on simple percentage calculations. Hence, the robustness of his results, and the significance of the estimates are not investigated. (3) The data set does not provide the necessary structure to study the dynamic effects of the characteristics of the working poor between and within groups. Our approach to problem (1) is to return to the original definition of the working poor (Klein, Bruce and Rones, 1989) and to establish a more rigorous metric function, which allows for intra regional cost of living variations and therewith a better measurement of the minimum living standards. Moreover, we will summarize all definitions of the working poor in all major advanced European economies in order to establish general relationships between number of hours of work, and definitions of poverty "line". This is the first study attempting to establish this relationship. The Swiss model (Sekiguchi and Sato, 2014) is a very good stating point, which defines working poor independent of the number of hours in employment. However, the model's weakness is its very country specific definition of the poverty line. We attempt to tackle that issue under (3) below. Our approach to problem (2) is to consider a much large panel data set including at least 5 waves of the labour survey and to impose advanced statistical models on the data. This will allows us to measure the statistical significance of our estimates and to establish the robustness of our model. (3) The richness of the structure of our data set allows us to apply sophisticated methods of machine learning such as unsupervised methods (Casella, 2015) to extract more general definitions of "poverty lines". It is precisely, this novel approach that will lead to significant new results in determining general metric functions in the measurement of absolute and relative poverty.

日本没有官方的“贫困线”，因此也没有关于贫困的官方统计数据（Sekine，2008年）。但实际上，经济学家们在评估日本的贫困状况时，采用的是OECD指数（收入中位数的50%），即“最低生活标准”。根据OECD指数，日本的相对贫困率为15.3%，在OECD国家中排名第五。然而，日本政府表示，根据绝对测量，不存在严重的贫困问题（Yuasa，2006）。然而，低收入人口的迅速增长，以及目前的社会保障和公共援助等安全网在个人范围内存在很大差距，这些都令人担忧（Kawai and Kanno，2006）。关于日本和其他发达经济体之间劳动穷人的比较分析的学术文献很少。Murakami描述了日本工作穷人的特征，并将其与加拿大（Murakami，2011年）和英国（Murakami，2009年）的工作穷人进行了比较。研究表明，在业穷人最有可能是年轻人、教育水平低、就业不稳定和在小公司工作的人。至于主要差异，在西方国家，男性更可能属于工作穷人，与英国和加拿大相比，日本25-44岁年龄组的工作穷人人数明显较多。本研究的目的在于改进村上关于绝对贫困测度的统计分析方法中的几个缺陷。(1)Murakami（2011）修订了贫困劳动者的定义（Iwai and Murakami，2007），并纳入了美国劳工统计局（BLS）提供的定义。但是，美国用贫困线来定义贫困，而日本没有贫困线。这种不一致的定义使用导致各国之间的结果无法比较。(2)村上春树的数据集是基于1997年和2002年的劳动力调查。他对数据强加了一个非常简单的统计模型，比较分析基于简单的百分比计算。因此，他的结果的鲁棒性，估计的意义没有调查。(3)这套数据没有提供必要的结构来研究在业穷人的特征在群体之间和群体内部的动态影响。我们对问题（1）的处理方法是回到工作穷人的最初定义（Klein，布鲁斯和Rones，1989年），并建立一个更严格的度量函数，考虑到区域内生活费用的变化，从而更好地衡量最低生活标准。此外，我们将总结所有主要先进欧洲经济体中对工作贫困的所有定义，以建立工作小时数与贫困线定义之间的一般关系。这是第一个试图建立这种关系的研究。瑞士模式（Sekiguchi和Sato，2014年）是一个很好的说明点，它定义了独立于就业小时数的工作穷人。然而，该模式的弱点是其对贫困线的具体国家定义。我们试图在下文第（3）项中解决这个问题。我们解决问题（2）的方法是考虑一个非常大的面板数据集，包括至少5波劳动力调查，并对数据施加先进的统计模型。这将使我们能够衡量我们的估计的统计意义，并建立我们的模型的鲁棒性。(3)我们数据集结构的丰富性使我们能够应用复杂的机器学习方法，如无监督方法（Casella，2015）来提取更一般的“贫困线”定义。正是这种新的方法将导致在确定衡量绝对和相对贫穷的一般衡量函数方面取得重大的新成果。