Is labor income responsible for poverty reduction ? a decomposition approach

João Pedro Azevedo, Gabriela Inchauste, Sergio Olivieri, Jaime Saavedra and Hernan Winkler

No 6414, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Demographics, labor income, public transfers, or remittances: Which factor contributes the most to observed reductions in poverty? Using counterfactual simulations, this paper accounts for the contribution labor income has made to the observed changes in poverty over the past decade for a set of 16 countries that have experienced substantial declines in poverty. In contrast to methods that focus on aggregate summary statistics, the analysis generates entire counterfactual distributions that allow assessing the contributions of different factors to observed distributional changes. Decompositions across all possible paths are calculated so the estimates are not subject to path-dependence. The analysis shows that for most countries in the sample, labor income is the most important contributor to changes in poverty. In ten of the countries, labor income explains more than half of the change in moderate poverty; in another four, it accounts for more than 40 percent of the reduction in poverty. Although public and private transfers were relatively more important in explaining the reduction in extreme poverty, more and better-paying jobs were the key factors behind poverty reduction over the past decade.

Keywords: Rural Poverty Reduction; Services&Transfers to Poor; Regional Economic Development; Poverty Monitoring&Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-lam and nep-ltv
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (46)

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