"Traditional measures of poverty and social exclusion are appropriate only to study the situation of single-member households. Once couples and other household configurations are considered these measures fail to capture real-life individual poverty risks given that they are based on the very strong, not to say incorrect, hypothesis of an equal sharing of income between partners. To address this failure in the traditional household-based poverty literature, this paper suggests an alternative and innovative approach to poverty analysis. It evaluates the risk of poverty at the individual rather than at the household level. The results of the analysis show great differences in individual incomes between men and women and important underestimation of women's poverty in Belgium using conventional poverty indicators."

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