poverty: Poverty in Switzerland

Description

Poverty measurements of elderly people (older than the Swiss legal retirement age) in Switzerland. The data are the (complete) subsample of participants of the canton Valais of the Vivre-Leben-Vivere (VLV) survey data.

Usage

data(poverty)

Arguments

Format

A data frame with 576 observations on the following variables

Poor: binary response variable on whether the person is considered as poor or not. 0 = no and 1 = yes.
Canton: the canton where the person lives. All individuals origin from the canton Wallis.
Gender: whether person is a male or a female.
AgeGroup: to which age group the person belongs to.
Edu: ordered 3-category measurement on the persons education.
CivStat: civil status.
NChild: number of children.
Working: whether the person is still working (even though all persons are in the legal retirement age).
FirstJob: 5-category classification of the person's first job.
LastJob: 5-category classification of the person's last job.
Origin: whether the person origins from Switzerland or a foreign country.
SocMob: whether and how the person has changed his social status over the life span.
RetirTiming: timing of the retirement relative to the legal retirement age.
ProfCar: 4-category classification of the professional carrier. Possible are "full employment", "missing / early retirement", "start and stop" and "stop and restart". The classification was retrieved from a longitudinal cluster analysis on the professional carriers in Gabriel et. al. (2014).
Pension: 5-category classification of the pension plan. Number refer to the Swiss pension three-pillar system.
TimFirstChild: timing of first child relative to the average timing of the first child of the same age group.

Source

VLV survey, see also http://cigev.unige.ch/recherches/vlv.html

Details

Poverty is defined by a threshold of 2400 Swiss francs per person in the household. Specifically, the poverty variable was retrieved from a self-rated ordinal variable with nine categories on household income and was adjusted by the OECD equivalence scales methodology (see http://www.oecd.org/eco/growth/OECD-Note-EquivalenceScales.pdf) to account for the household size.

The variables Canton, Gender and AgeGroup represent the stratification variables of the survey design.

The data include a significant number of missings, in particular for Poor and RetirTiming. The authors are grateful to Rainer Gabriel, Michel Oris and the Centre interfacultaire de gerontologie et d'etudes des vulnerabilites (CIGEV) at the University of Geneva for providing the prepared data set.

References

Ludwig, C., S. Cavalli and M. Oris ‘Vivre/Leben/Vivere’: An interdisciplinary survey addressing progress and inequalities of ageing over the past 30 years in Switzerland. Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics. Gabriel, R., M. Oris, M. Studer and M. Baeriswyl (2014). The Persistance of Social Stratification? Article in progress.