Giovanni Ferro Luzzi

A Cluster Analysis of Multidimensional Poverty in Switzerland

The basic notion that poverty should be measured on the basis of as large a number of components (attributes) as relevant and feasible has enjoyed increasing support in the literature. Since the seminal work of Townsend (1979), it has been recognized that other aspects of life not necessarily related to income can impair human development, such as the access to public goods, health, or education. Many authors have come up with new approaches to provide poverty measures which account for its multidimensionality while maintaining desirable properties (Bourguignon and Chakravarty, 1999, 2003; Atkinson, 2003). One main conceptual issue is how to count multidimensional poverty. In other words, is multidimensional poverty the accumulation of deprivation in various components of what is considered ‘normal life’ (the intersection approach) or should it be defined as the failure to access to at least one of the dimensions (the union approach)?

The effect of parental background on track choices and wages

SummaryIntergenerational links are often investigated by computing educational attainment correlations between parents and children, even though parental background may influence outcomes at earlier stages of the educational path. Because of early school track selection and widespread vocational training, this effect may be quite important in the Swiss context. We first investigate the importance of parental background variables for upper secondary educational attainment over the last 6 decades. We next estimate the impact of parental background on earnings. This effect is shown to depend on the magnitude of intergenerational correlations, the returns to qualifications and the availability of further training for those having ended up in a low educational track at age 15. The impact of tracking at age 15 on wage inequality is found to be relatively small in Switzerland, comparing to results for Germany. Relatively low returns from academic education best explain this pattern.

On gender differences in wages in Switzerland

In this paper, we devise a new methodology to analyse the gender differences in wage inequality. We first examine some traditional wage decomposition based on the means of wages, and then show how this approach can be extended to the whole distribution by using a simple measure of inequality, that is the variance of the logarithm of wages. We then apply this method to Swiss data for the years 1991 and 1995. It appears that the greatest contribution to gender wage inequality differences in Switzerland is due to differences in the distributions of unobservable characteristics, while human capital tends to compensate slightly for this effect.

Measuring the Performance of MFIs: An Application of Factor Analysis

MFIs face a double challenge: not only do they have to provide financial services to the poor (outreach), but they also have to cover their costs in order to avoid bankruptcy (sustainability). Both dimensions must therefore be taken into account in order to assess their performance.