Using Simple Cross-country Comparisons to Guide Measurement: Poverty in the CFA Franc Zone

In order to inform discussions on the extent of poverty in a country, it is often useful to compare the country’s poverty measures to estimates obtained in other countries with similar levels of development within the same region of the world. This short dissemination note provides estimates of poverty for countries from the Franc CFA zone and shows how simple cross-country poverty comparisons were used to inform poverty measurement in these countries.Poverty, Franc CFA zone, cross-country comparisons

Government Programs and Poverty

The strategy of the Zedillo Administration for the reduction of poverty relied on both broad-based social expenditures and targeted poverty programs. Broad-based social expenditures are devoted to the areas of social security and healthcare, education, job training, and housing. Targeted poverty programs focus on investing in the human capital of the poor, promoting income and employment opportunities for the poor, and improving the physical infrastructure of poor areas. Public funding for targeted programs has increased much faster over the last dozen years than the programmable budget. Within targeted spending, half of the funds are devoted to human capital, a third to physical infrastructure, and the rest to income opportunities. This paper is based on the poverty assessment for Mexico completed by the World Bank. It evaluates the impact of government programs and policies on poverty. After summarizing the key findings through 10 strategic questions, the paper reviews broad-based social expenditure and government programs targeted to the poor.Mexico; poverty; government programs; impact evaluation

Microdeterminants of consumption, poverty, growth, and inequality in Bangladesh

Using household data from five successive national surveys, the author analyzes the microdeterminants of (and changes in) consumption, poverty, growth, and inequality in Bangladesh from 1983 to 1996. Education, demographics, land ownership, occupation, and geographic location all affect consumption and poverty. The gains in per capita consumption associated with many of these household characteristics tend to be stable over time. Returns to demographics (variables in household size) have the greatest impact on growth, perhaps because of improving employment opportunities for women. Education (in urban areas) and land (in rural areas) contribute most to measures of between-group inequality. Location takes second place, in both urban and rural areas. The author introduces the concept of conditional between-group inequality. Existing group decompositions of the Gini index along one variable do not control for other characteristics correlated with that variable. Conditional between-group Ginis avoid this pitfall. He also shows how to use unconditional and conditional between-group Ginis for simulating policies.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Services&Transfers to Poor,Public Health Promotion,Housing&Human Habitats,Inequality,Poverty Assessment,Environmental Economics&Policies,Services&Transfers to Poor,Safety Nets and Transfers

Growth, poverty, and inequality : a regional panel for Bangladesh

Most empirical work on how growth affects poverty and inequality has been based on international panel data sets. Panels can also be used within a country, if the analysis is carried out at the regional level. The author does this for Bangladesh, where regional panel estimates indicate that growth reduces poverty in both urban and rural areas. Growth is associated with rising inequality only in urban areas. Simulations based on these estimates indicate how much poverty reduction could increase in the next 10 years if growth were promoted in rural areas rather than urban areas.Services&Transfers to Poor,Economic Conditions and Volatility,Public Health Promotion,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Governance Indicators,Poverty Assessment,Services&Transfers to Poor,Rural Poverty Reduction,Achieving Shared Growth

Between group inequality and targeted transfers

The author provides two extensions to Yitzhaki and Lerman's group decomposition of the Gini index. First, he analyzes stratification (within the group) and inequality (between groups) along several dimensions at once. This makes the determinants of inequality more understandable. Second, he derives the impact on the Gini of marginal changes in income or consumption by group. This can be used to evaluate targeted redistributive policies or to assess the impact of exogenous shocks by group. He applies the analysis to data from Bangladesh, with a focus on how inequality affects land ownership, education, and occupation. Education appears to be a stronger determinant of inequality than occupation, with land ownership ranking third. Marginal targeted transfers and taxes have more effect on redistribution when applied to education (from the well-educated to the illiterate) or occupation groups (from officials and managers to tenants and agricultural workers).Services&Transfers to Poor,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Drylands&Desertification,Inequality,Environmental Economics&Policies,Poverty Impact Evaluation,Services&Transfers to Poor,Rural Poverty Reduction

May growth lead to higher deprivation despite higher satisfaction ?

In a relative deprivation framework, unless inequality is reduced, growth is associated with both higher satisfaction and higher deprivation. This may help explain the discontent with growth despite its benefits. As is well known in the literature, knowledge of the population's mean income and Lorenz curve is all that is needed to analyze a distribution, so that this can also be used to assess the satisfaction and deprivation of each individual. Given the normalization used to derive the satisfaction and deprivation measures, satisfaction and deprivation add up to the mean income for the population as a whole as well as for each individual.Economic Theory&Research,Inequality,Poverty Impact Evaluation,,Labor Policies

Poverty and Inequality

While there are different estimates of poverty in Mexico, there is general agreement that poverty is widespread, and that the reduction of poverty should be a key area of focus for the new Administration. Beyond lack of income, poverty is a complex and multidimensional phenomena which affects many areas of the life of the poor. As a result, a wide range of public policies have been implemented in Mexico, as elsewhere, to reduce poverty and improve the well-being of the population. This paper has two objectives. First, it briefly presents a framework that could be used by the new Administration to prepare a coherent strategy for poverty reduction. Second, it provides a synthesis of eight background chapters devoted to government programs, social protection, education, health, urban labor markets, rural development, indigenous peoples, and gender that all relate to poverty in Mexico.Mexico; poverty; inequality

Assessing the geographic impact of higher food prices in Guinea

Telling a policy maker that poverty will increase due to the recent increase in food prices is not very useful; telling the policy makers where the impact is likely to be larger is better, so that measures to cope with the impact of the crisis can be targeted to areas that need them the most. This paper shows how to use poverty mapping techniques to assess where higher food prices are likely to hurt the most using Guinea census and survey data as a case study. The results suggest that in the case of a rice price increase, the poorest areas of the country will not be the hardest hit, especially if the potential positive impact of higher food prices on rice producers is taken into account, in which case poverty may decline in some of these areas even if for the country as a whole poverty will increase significantly due to the large share of rice in the household consumption budget.Rural Poverty Reduction,Population Policies,Small Area Estimation Poverty Mapping,Achieving Shared Growth

Argentinas Crises and the Poor, 1995-2002

This paper documents the impact of Argentina's recent economic crises on different aspects of poverty, with a special focus on the economic collapse of 2002. We discuss the methodology of poverty measurement in Argentina and we use a simple rule to compensate for the lack of regional poverty figures until 2001, providing consistent series of urban poverty estimates at the national and regional levels. We then present series of short term dynamics of poverty, decomposing the changes in every period of time with panel data. Finally, we analyse the determinants of poverty, with a focus on accounting for observed differences in income (and thereby poverty) between October 2001 and May 2002. Among other conclusions, we find in our decomposition analysis that households without the means to diversify their income sources suffered more than others from the crisis of 2002.Poverty, unemployment, Argentina.