Elena Barcena Martin, Ph.D., Antonio Fernandez Morales, M.B.A., and Guillermina Martin Reyes, Ph.D. University of Malaga, C/El Ejido, Malaga, 29071, Spain
Abstract.
This paper makes use of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) to compare poverty rates for individuals living in female headed households with poverty rates for those living in male headed ones in 11 countries of the European Union.
We add to the existing research in analysing survival functions of the variable permanence in poverty before exit for the eleven countries in the European Union in 1994-2000. Hence, the main contribution of this work is to analyse if the opportunities to move up the income distribution for individuals in its lowest tail will be affected by the time they remain in low income in different way depending on the sex of the head of the household. That is, we consider explicitly the effects of duration dependence on transition probabilities differentiating among individuals who live in female headed households and those who live in male headed ones.
We estimate non parametric hazard exit rates to measure persistence, a method which does not make any assumption about the functional form of the hazard. Then we define the concept of dominance in survival function and compare the survival function for female and male headed households. All this allows us to study the effect of the gender of the head of the household in the within and in the between countries dominance analysis. We rank the eleven countries of the EU getting three different rankings depending on the dominance in survival functions: one for individuals living in female headed households, other for those living in male headed households, and other for both types of individuals.
We find that the gender poverty gap was very large in some countries (Netherlands, France and United Kingdom), moderate in other countries (Germany, Belgium and Ireland) and low in some other (Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Denmark).
We study if the opportunities to exit poverty are affected by the time they remain on low income in different way depending on the sex of the head of the household. This analysis reveals that, for all the countries, the percentage of individuals staying in poverty reduces as time in poverty lengthens, but the decline rate is lower after three years. Portugal is the EU country with the lowest poverty exit rate at any duration, no matter the sex of the head of the household where the individual is living. On the other hand, Netherland and Denmark spend less time in poverty before exiting.
From the within countries survival function dominance analysis we learn that in Denmark, Italy, Greece and United Kingdom the sex of the head of the household where the individual is living does not significantly alter the survival functions, while in the rest of the countries there exist statistically significant differences between survival functions, depending on the sex of the head of the household. Only in Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Ireland and Spain an individual living in a household whose head is a woman exit at a lower rate at any duration.