JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Wisconsin Press andThe Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Human Resources. ABSTRACT This paper proposes an alternative formulation for the Sen-Shorrocks-Thon (SST) index of poverty intensity that is appropriate for survey data with sampling weights. It also decomposes the SST index into the poverty rate, the average poverty gap ratio among the poor, and the overall Gini index of poverty gap ratios. To account for sampling variation in estimates of poverty intensity, this paper uses the bootstrap method to compute confidence intervals and presents international comparisons using Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data from the 1970s to the 1990s. Crosssectional and longitudinal analyses indicate that the percentage change in poverty intensity can be approximated by the sum of percentage changes in the poverty rate and average poverty gap ratio, since changes in the overall Gini index of poverty gap ratios are negligible. In the early 1970s poverty intensity in Canada and the United States was almost indistinguishable, but in the 1970s Canadian poverty intensity decreased.Analysts and policymakers often want to know if poverty has gotten "worse" or "better" and if poverty 'here" is worse or better than poverty "elsewhere." Comparisons are, of course, only the first stage in asking such questions as whether better outcomes are possible, what causes poverty trends, and how possible policies might influence those trends. Atkinson (1999), however, has recently emphasized the importance of such comparisons and has argued for the adoption of formal targets for poverty alleviation, similar in spirit to the Maastricht Treaty objectives for inflation and government budget deficits. Such targets depend on the possibility of both year-to-year and jurisdiction-to-jurisdiction comparisons. He suggests that in the current hierarchy of policy, "macro-economic policy is determined first and then social policy is left to address the social consequences" (1999, p. 20). Because this separation of macroeconomic and social policy is inefficient in attaining either intermediate macroeconomic objectives or ultimate human welfare goals, Atkinson advocates the setting of a poverty target alongside targets for inflation and budget deficits.This raises the issue of how best to summarize the extent of poverty and how best to compare poverty outcomes. Although poverty comparisons have become important in international debate, their statistical and conceptual significance is often open to question. The most commonly used measures are the poverty rate (the percentage of the population whose incomes...

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In this work, we study the role of firm characteristics and worker attributes in determining participation in workplace employer‐sponsored training in Canada using the Workplace and Employee Survey (WES) of Statistics Canada. We attempt to answer the following questions using the rich information of firms that are available in WES data: Does firms' provision of workplace training encourage workers' participation in Canada? How do changes in market competition, organizational changes, and technological innovation affect workers' participation in workplace training in Canada? We find that firms' training provision significantly affects workers' participation in Canada. We also find that increased international competition, organizational changes, and technological innovation are significantly correlated with workers' training participation at workplaces. We note that workers in some sectors and in smaller firms have lower workplace training incidence and older, part‐time, production and marketing/sales workers and workers with preschool children participate less in workplace training. (JEL J080, J240, J290)