TIPs for the Analysis of Poverty in Mexico, 1992-2005

Abstract

This paper proposes some changes to the official methodology that is currently in use to measure the state of poverty in Mexico. Among other suggestions, it is recommended the use of bootstrapping to estimate confidence intervals for the poverty statistics, as well as the use of dominance analysis when making intertemporal comparisons. In particular, since poverty lines change over time, the paper proposes the use of TIP curves for that end. Using the eight surveys that were made during the period 1992-2005, the paper presents a large number of absolute poverty statistics and TIP curves, as well as comparisons among them.Poverty, confidence intervals, standard error, bootstrap, resampling, FGT measures, TIP curves, dominance, Mexico