Chapter 1 Intro

The R convey library estimates measures of poverty, inequality and richness/affluence. There are two other R libraries covering this subject, vardpoor (⊕Breidaks, Liberts, and Ivanova 2020Breidaks, Juris, Martins Liberts, and Santa Ivanova. 2020. vardpoor: Estimation of Indicators on Social Exclusion and Poverty and Its Linearization, Variance Estimation. Riga, Latvia: Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia. https://csblatvia.github.io/vardpoor/.) and laeken (⊕Alfons and Templ 2013Alfons, Andreas, and Matthias Templ. 2013. “Estimation of Social Exclusion Indicators from Complex Surveys: The R Package laeken.” Journal of Statistical Software 54 (15): 1–25. http://www.jstatsoft.org/v54/i15/.), however, only convey integrates seamlessly with the R survey package (⊕Lumley 2004Lumley, Thomas. 2004. “Analysis of Complex Survey Samples.” Journal of Statistical Software 9 (1): 1–19., ⊕2010Lumley, Thomas. 2010. Complex Surveys: A Guide to Analysis Using r: A Guide to Analysis Using r. John Wiley; Sons., ⊕2020Lumley, Thomas. 2020. “Survey: Analysis of Complex Survey Samples.”).

convey is free and open-source software that runs inside the R environment for statistical computing. Anyone can review and propose changes to the source code for this software. Readers are welcome to propose changes to this book as well.

As a companion guide, this flowchart clarifies the various options in this software:

Individuals getting started in the field of poverty and inequality statistics might find the number of techniques described in this textbook overwhelming, especially choosing which method might be most appropriate for each particular research question. The authors of this textbook consider Dr. Ija Trapeznikova’s article Measuring income inequality an important summary of how to approach selecting between available techniques.