Samuel Freije

For Richer or for Poorer ? Evidence from Indonesia, South Africa, Spain, and Venezuela

We analyze household income dynamics using longitudinal data from Indonesia, South Africa (KwaZulu-Natal), Spain and Venezuela. In all four countries, households with the lowest reported base-year income experienced the largest absolute income gains. This result is robust to reasonable amounts of measurement error in two of the countries. In three of the four countries, households with the lowest predicted base-year income experienced gains at least as large as their wealthier counterparts. Thus, with one exception, the empirical importance of cumulative advantage, poverty traps, and skill-biased technical change was no greater than structural or macroeconomic changes that favored initially poor households in these four countries.

Household Income Dynamics: A Four-Country Story

In this article, we analyse the dynamics of household per capita incomes using longitudinal data from Indonesia, South Africa, Spain and Venezuela. We find that in all four countries reported initial income and job changes of the head are consistently the most important variables in accounting for income changes, overall and for initially poor households. We also find that changes in income are more important than changes in household size and that changes in labour earnings are more important than changes in other sources of household income.

Conditional Transfers, Labor Supply, and Poverty: Microsimulating Oportunidades

This article summarizes a microsimulation exercise for the Mexican human development program Oportunidades and presents a series of simulations of its actual and potential impact upon poverty at the national, urban and rural levels. The microsimulation tool used for this paper makes accounting and behavioral exercises and aims to answer three main questions: What would have happened to poverty if the program had been cancelled, if benefits were doubled, or if urban beneficiaries were doubled? We conclude that Oportunidades can be associated with up to a third of the reduction in rural poverty in Mexico by the year 2002. Doubling benefits and targeting urban beneficiaries would reduce poverty a further 30 percent from its 2002 level. We also find that each percentage point of poverty reduction at the rural level costs around 326 million pesos per month in cash transfers (that is, 1.2 percent of the central government´s total spending in 2002). Further reductions of poverty would have higher or lower average costs depending on the area and on whether they are performed either by extensions in coverage or by enlargement of benefits. Finally, behavioral simulations suggest that labor supply does not seem to be much affected by current cash transfers from Oportunidades.

Intragenerational Income Mobility in Latin America

Economic mobility has not been widely studied in developing countries until very recently owing to the lack of suitable data. Studying mobility requires longitudinal data tracking economic units (that is, individuals, households, or firms) over time. Collecting this type of data is expensive, and historically few Latin American countries carried it out. Now, however, such data sets are available for a number of Latin American and Caribbean countries; table A-1 in the appendix provides a list of available panel data sets that can be used for income mobility studies for these countries. In this paper, we discuss how the knowledge gleaned from mobility studies differs from comparable cross-sectional analysis. The structure of the paper is as follows. The next section discusses what mobility is, how it can be measured, and how it differs from inequality. The subsequent section reviews previous mobility studies in Latin American countries. The paper then summarizes the contributions of our own recent work, and the final section discusses what lies ahead in mobility research for Latin American economies.

Escaping From Poverty: Household Income Dynamics in Indonesia, South Africa, Spain, and Venezuela

Opponents of free trade argue that in today’s global economy, unfettered access to foreign capital, technology, and goods primarily benefits a well-connected and highly skilled elite, to the exclusion of the poor, voiceless majority. Are the rich getting richer at the expense of the poorer?