It's Time: Poverty, Inequality and Sustainability beyond the Mean
by Franziska Dorn
Date of Examination:2021-11-19
Date of issue:2022-03-08
Advisor:Prof. Dr. Thomas Kneib
Referee:Prof. Phd Nancy Folbre
Referee:Prof. Phd Inmaculada Martínez-Zarzoso
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Abstract
English
Differences in time allocation enlighten patterns of gendered poverty. This thesis disentangles the interlinked nature of deprivations in leisure time and income as well as income inequality and carbon emissions. Regressions beyond the mean shed light on the strength of their dependence, which influences vulnerability to poverty and potentials for a sustainable future. The first essay of this dissertation sets out that unpaid responsibilities need to be done to sustain a family. Complex processes of reciprocal causality channel women into unpaid work, resulting in reduced participation in market work and lower access to an independent income. Results show a significant gender gap in the type of unpaid work performed and differences in trade-offs between unpaid work and paid work using the 2014 Mexican National Occupation and Employment Survey. The second essay investigates the relationship between leisure time and income deprivation, developing a bivariate relative poverty line using data on individual monetary income and leisure from the 2018 Mexican National Survey of Households, Income and Expenses. Distributional copula models shed light on the vulnerability to such bidimensional poverty. The strength of dependence between leisure and income varies with educational level and number of children, which intensifies the vulnerability to bidimensional poverty for women but not for men in Mexico; moreover, non-indigenous women are more vulnerable to relative poverty, while indigenous women are more vulnerable to absolute poverty. The third essay provides a critical review of time and income measures developed by Vickery (1977), Bardasi and Wodon (2010) and Zacharias et al. (2012) and the approach from the previous essay. This comparison demonstrates that an all-encompassing bidimensional measure needs to include minimum thresholds of money, leisure and unpaid work as well as information on their substitutability. The fourth essay identifies bidirectional transmission channels to reduce income inequality and carbon emissions simultaneously. Distributional copula models analyze determinants of their interdependence by using an unbalanced data set of 154 countries from 1960 to 2019. Level of consumption, energy sources, economic sectors and political system relate to the strength of dependence providing insights into probabilities of countries falling into an area of potential social and environmental sustainability.
Keywords: Time and income poverty; Social and ecological sustainability; Unpaid work; Distributional copula regression; Gender inequality; Intersectionality