Comparación con las teorías de uso habitual

We then looked at trends in ‘consistent’ poverty, that is the numbers both below relative income poverty lines and experiencing basic deprivation. We saw that the percentage of households and individuals in consistent poverty declined sharply from 1994 to 2001, and also fell between 1998 and 2001, whether income lines based on the mean or median were employed (unless a very low relative income line was used). By 2001, only 5 per cent of persons were below 70 per cent of median income and experiencing basic deprivation, compared with 10 per cent in 1997 and 15 per cent in 1994.

In comparison with the poverty line set at 60 per cent of median income the consistent poverty line involving the 70 per cent line is proportionately less likely to identify the self-employed, farmers and the retired and more likely to lead to a focus on the ill/disabled and the unemployed. Those in home duties are identified as a high-risk group by both approaches. These differences, as we would have anticipated, reflect the fact that the self-employed and the retired are less dependent on current income and draw on a wider portfolio of resources.

The consistent poverty approach is also less likely to identify individuals in adult only households and more likely to identify individuals in households with one adult and children. The latter households continue to face a particularly high risk of consistent poverty, followed by those in families with two adults and four or

more children. The percentage of adults in households below 70 per cent of median income and experiencing basic deprivation has fallen from 9 per cent in 1997 to around 4 per cent, while the percentage of children in such households fell from 15 per cent to 7 per cent. Women aged 65 or over faced a significantly higher risk of consistent poverty than men of that age.

Distinguishing between households where the reference person is aged less than 65 years and those where the HRP is 65 years or over has no effect on the consistent poverty rate whereas the former are substantially more likely to fall below the 60 per cent median income line. This reflects the fact that there is a much weaker relationship between low income and basic deprivation for the elderly. While current cash income is an imperfect indicator of living standards for many social groups, the correlation between the two is particularly weak among older people – the elderly in general have higher living standards than their modest incomes would suggest.

This is not a new finding although the discrepancy has increased in recent years. Layte et al. (1999) found that there are many reasons why the link between low income and risk of material deprivation is weak among older people. First, most elderly benefit from a range of ‘free schemes’ provided by the state which are not available to the rest of the population (free travel, free electricity, free telephone allowance etc.) and which are generally omitted in calculations of older people’s current incomes. Second, many elderly people have accumulated significant resources, which help sustain their expenditure requirements (e.g. most elderly own their own homes outright and are not required to provide for mortgage and rent systems). Elderly persons are also likely to be buffered from extreme deprivation through the operation of family support systems. The point is not that low incomes are unimportant as an indicator of social disadvantage or that trends towards increasing numbers below income poverty thresholds are not a cause for concern for anti- poverty policy. It is rather that poverty measures whether income or deprivation designed to operate across the entire population may have significant limitations in grasping the complexities of the situation of any particular sub-group. Thus cash incomes may be less crucial as a means of alleviating elderly deprivation than is the case for other sectors of the population. On the other hand, for the elderly, policies focused on quality rather than cost of housing and health and social services may be particularly important.

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his report, like most poverty research, has so far concentrated on cross-sectional poverty figures, i.e. the proportion of individuals or households below a set poverty threshold at a single point in time. This information is important and can tell us a great deal about the risks that certain groups face of poor living standards and social exclusion. However, in recent years there has been an increasing interest in using dynamic, or longitudinal measures of poverty as awareness has grown of the importance of time in the experience of poverty. Although poverty is never welcome, short spells of low income are unlikely to seriously impact on living standards and damage life chances. Long term, or persistent poverty on the other hand can seriously harm quality of life and lead to a qualitatively different experience of deprivation. The growing awareness of the importance of persistent poverty in social policy circles in the EU led at the Laeken summit in 2001, to the adoption of a persistent poverty measure as one of 18 common statistical indicators of social inclusion. In this chapter we present findings using this measure and examine both the extent of and trends in persistent poverty in Ireland.

6.1

In document Propiedades eléctricas y ópticas del ácido desoxirribonucleico (página 81-85)