Counting the missing poor in pre-industrial societies

Mathieu Lefebvre (1) , Pierre Pestieau (2, 3, 4, 5) , Gregory Ponthiere (6)

1 AMSE - Aix-Marseille Sciences Economiques
2 Université de Liège
3 CORE - Center of Operation Research and Econometrics [Louvain]
4 PSE - Paris School of Economics
5 PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques
6 UCL - Université Catholique de Louvain = Catholic University of Louvain

Under income-differentiated mortality, poverty measures suffer from a selection bias: they do not count the missing poor (i.e., persons who would have been counted as poor provided they did not die prematurely). The Pre-Industrial period being characterized by an evolutionary advantage (i.e., a higher number of surviving children per household) of the non-poor over the poor, one may expect that the missing poor bias is substantial during that period. This paper quantifies the missing poor bias in Pre-Industrial societies, by computing the hypothetical headcount poverty rates that would have prevailed provided the non-poor did not benefit from an evolutionary advantage over the poor. Using data on Pre-Industrial England and France, we show that the sign and size of the missing poor bias are sensitive to the degree of downward social mobility.

Mots clés: Measurement; Selection effects; Missing poor; Poverty

Domaines: Economies et finances

Mathieu Lefebvre, Pierre Pestieau, Gregory Ponthiere. Counting the missing poor in pre-industrial societies. Cliometrica, 2023, 17 (1), pp.155-183. ⟨10.1007/s11698-022-00243-y⟩. ⟨hal-03620370⟩