How Sensitive Is Regional Poverty Measurement in Latin America to the Value of the Poverty Line?

Leonardo Lucchetti (), Andrés Castañeda (), Santiago Garriga (), Leonardo Gasparini and Daniel Valderrama-Gonzalez

Economía Journal, 2018, vol. Volume 19 Number 1, issue Fall 2018, 33-58

Abstract: This paper contributes to the methodological literature on the estimation of international poverty lines for Latin America based on the official poverty lines chosen by Latin American governments and commonly used in the public debate. The paper exploits a compre- hensive data set of 86 up-to-date official extreme and total urban poverty lines across eighteen countries in Latin America, as well as the recently updated values of the national purchasing power parity conversion factors from the 2011 International Comparison Program and a set of harmonized household surveys. Using US$3.00 and US$6.00 per person a day at 2011 PPP as the extreme and total poverty lines, respectively, for Latin America, this paper illustrates the sensitiv- ity of poverty rates to changes of the values of the poverty lines as a result of the recent update of the PPP values, the period of reference, and the relative cost of living across the countries in the region. Total poverty rates in Latin America increase when the 2011 PPP values are used instead of the 2005 PPP values, while the extreme poverty rate is unaffected. In general, country-specific poverty rankings remain fairly stable regardless of the values of the poverty lines selected.

Keywords: Poverty; poverty lines; purchasing power parity; Latin America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D6 E31 F01 I3 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://economia.lacea.org/contents.htm

Related works:
Working Paper: How Sensitive is Regional Poverty Measurement in Latin America to the Value of the Poverty Line? (2018)
Working Paper: How sensitive is regional poverty measurement in Latin America to the value of the poverty line? (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:col:000425:016953

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economía Journal from The Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association - LACEA Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LACEA ().