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Decomposing Youth Poverty in 22 Countries
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income poverty and
Q(Wi)
and
Q(wi)
are the
αβ
-standardized rates
for welfare effectiveness for Taiwan and any other selected country,
respectively. For example, to evaluate the contribution of
household composition to the difference in poverty rates between
Taiwan and for instance, Denmark, I compute a hypothetical
poverty difference by keeping each country’s own distribution of
household composition but substituting the BTST income poverty
rates and welfare effectiveness of Taiwan and Denmark with
identical values (Heuveline & Weinshenker, 2008). As the
equations show, the identical values are the exhaustive
combinations of the BTST income poverty and welfare
effectiveness of Taiwan and Denmark (i.e.
M
i
X W
i
,
m
i
X w
i
,
M
i
X w
i
,
and
m
i
X W
i
). In other words, the equations show how the disparity
in poverty between Taiwan and Denmark would change if each
country were to keep its own distribution of household
composition but use the identical BTST income poverty rate and
welfare effectiveness (i.e. held constant).