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- Published on: 25 October 2019
- Published on: 25 October 2019Creating small-areas deprivation indices at a European level
In their article (1) Allik et al. proposes a very interesting contribution on the principles and options for the construction of deprivation indices. About weighting indicators, they referred to the European deprivation index (EDI), an index aiming at using a unique methodology for all European Union, and advised to rather be “guided by theory and the specific context of each country” than data-driven. We totally agree that deprivation indices need to be theory driven. The construction of EDI is then guided by this approach. EDI is indeed based on the fundamental concept of relative poverty defined by the material impossibility of accessing basic needs that correspond to the average standard of living in a given country. This theoretical development was proposed by Townsend and Gordon in various publications at the end of the 20th century. In order to propose a measure of relative poverty that should be as comparable as possible between European countries, these basic needs have been defined specifically in each country from the same European database (EUSILC) with the same methodology.
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This country–specific basics needs were then tested through regression analyzes to make sure that they were well correlated with objective and subjective poverty, here again specifically in each country, and that additivity, validity and reliability were preserved. Finally, we selected by regression analysis the country-specific combination of features the most correlated to these bas...Conflict of Interest:
None declared.