Too little but not too late. Nowcasting poverty and cash transfers' incidence in Uruguay during COVID-19's crisis

Matias Brum () and Mauricio de Rosa ()
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Mauricio de Rosa: Universidad de la República (Uruguay). Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración. Instituto de Economía

No 20-09, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Instituto de Economía - IECON

Abstract: The economic crisis triggered by COVID-19 is causing a world-wide massive economic downturn, and what is likely to be the deepest GDP contraction for Latin America since the beginning of the XXth century. We microsimulate the short-run effect of the crisis on the poverty rate for the Uruguayan case based on household survey data, publicly available information on both cash-transfers and the increase in unemployed formal wage-earners applying for unemployment benefits, as well as macro-economic estimates of the likely GDP contraction. By combining these data sources, we are able to estimate the effect of the crisis on formal, informal and self-employed workers, while providing full micro-macro consistency to our results. We find that during the first full month of the lock-down, the poverty rate reaches 11.7%, an increase of over 36%. Moreover, new cash transfers implemented by the government have a positive but very limited effect in mitigating this poverty spike. We estimate that most of this increase in poverty could be neutralized with cash-transfers worth less than 0.5% of Uruguay’s annual GDP.

Keywords: COVID-19; nowcasting; poverty; microsimulations; developing countries; Uruguay (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D04 D31 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2020-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lam
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/24909

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ulr:wpaper:dt-09-20

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