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Investment in Quality2. It has a deprivation rate almost twice as high as for any other itemand, thus, on its own would significantly influence the extent of povertyrecorded; this is undesirable in a single item. It is also considered to bemore open to the influence of taste than the other items. For these tworeasons, the ESRI advocate dropping it.Nolan et al.(2002a) apply the same technique (factor analysis) thatled to the identification of eight items from 1987 data to data thathave been available since 1994 for Ireland and most other EUmember states through the European Community Household Panel(ECHP). (The different—but not hugely so—questions formulatedin 1994 for the ECHP have the added advantage looking ahead thatthey will continue to be used to gather data at regular intervalsthrough the new EU-Survey of Income and Living Standards(SILC) that is replacing the ECHP.) Their analysis allowed sevenitems on which data are gathered by ECHP/SILC to be identified asconsistently associated with a dimension of basic deprivation(column 3, Table 8.5) and to appear as “serious candidates” as analternative set of indicators for future monitoring purposes (p. 57).TABLE 8.6Percentage of Persons In Consistent Poverty, Using Current andRevised MeasuresMeasure of Consistent PovertyPercentage of Personsin Poverty1994 1997 2000Below 70% median income and 14.5 10.7 5.5experiencing basic deprivation (old list)Below 70% median income and 18.3 15.5 10.5experiencing basic deprivation (new list)Source: Nolan et al. (2002a: Table 7.5)When the proposed alternative list of indicators of basic lifestyledeprivation are used in place of the original list of eight items, thepicture of how poverty has fared in Ireland during the economicboom changes. An example is shown in Table 8.6; almost the samepercentage of the population escaped poverty (8 to 9 per cent) but424