poverty {vcrpart}

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)

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.

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 https://www.oecd.org/economy/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.

Source

VLV survey

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 (2015). The Persistance of Social Stratification? Swiss Journal of Sociology, 41(3), 465–487.