Growth and Income Redistribution Components of Changes in Poverty: A Decomposition Analysis for Ireland, 1987-2005

This study analysed the contribution of economic growth and redistribution components to aggregate poverty changes in Ireland from 1987-2005, using the Shapley value decomposition approach. The analysis used the household disposable income data from the Household Budget Survey to calculate poverty indices. The result of the Shapley value decomposition of poverty changes into growth and redistribution components revealed that the growth component dominates the redistribution component in bringing about the decline in poverty. This suggests that the drastic fall in absolute poverty over the survey period could be attributed to the increase in the household mean income rather than the redistributive policies of government transfer and income tax systems. We also investigated the extent to which economic growth experienced over the survey period has been pro-poor, by using the Growth Incidence Curve proposed by Ravallion and Chen (2003). It was found that economic growth was slightly pro-poor between 1987 and 1994 and generally anti-poor between 1994 and 1999.