Rod Hick (The Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, London School of Economics and Political Science)
Abstract
This paper examines changes to value of the state pensions and poverty rates for older men and women during the two terms of the Fianna Fáil — Progressive Democrat coalition government in Ireland between 1997 and 2007. It is shown that despite consistent increases in the value of the state pensions relative to earnings, poverty increased during the initial years of the period only to fall dramatically thereafter. While the increase in poverty at the 50 per cent median income rate between 1997 and 2001 was experienced disproportionately by women, there has also been an important gender dimension to the reduction in poverty amongst the over 65s since 2001. Since 2003, women have been no more likely than men to fall below the 50 per cent of median income poverty line or to fall below the 60 per cent line since 2004. However, analysis of data from the 2006 Irish release of the EU Survey of Income and Living Conditions shows that older women remained more likely than men to experience poverty as measured at 70 per cent of median income. A logistic regression model is used to identify underlying differences in poverty rates between men and women after adjusting for other independent variables. The results show that after adjusting for differences in occupation, household composition, geography and health status, the odds of a woman falling below the 70 per cent median income line remained 1.25 times that of a man.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Geary Institute, University College Dublin in its series Working Papers with number
200902.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: