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This paper reviews the different approaches and policies that are most used in the literature to measure the level of poverty with tools of fuzzy logic. These policies are based on the integrated measurement method (IM), which combines poverty line methods and unmet basic needs. Moreover, we present the most recent studies on the measurement of the level of poverty in different sectors and populations, as well as the more relevant conclusions of the work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first analyzes the performance of Latin America during the long economic cycle that took place between 1998 and 2014, which combined the regional effects of the Asian crisis with a growth phase driven by a supercycle of commodity prices. However, the expansionary phase was followed by a five-year period of economic stagnation, during which previous achievements were weakened, even before the covid-19 crisis erupted, with its negative consequences. This confirms the persistence of the region's economic vulnerability to external shocks, as well as the difficulties in maintaining sustained growth rates associated with processes of structural change, which make it possible to reduce the gap in the development levels vis-à-vis the leading countries and face the challenges of environmental sustainability. It is also pointed out that, despite the important achievements in terms of social development during the recent growth cycle, the high structural inequalities that characterize the region were not broken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: "Middle class" is a polysemic social category. In methodological terms, it is similar to that of poverty, both without consensus according to literature. A comprehensive review of literature is made in this paper, emphasizing on single and multidimensional methodologies, identifying non-consensual findings when using and building thresholds and different dimensions. Methodology: This paper proposes identification of Mexican Middle Class according to a multidimensional perspective, consistent with Coneval's multidimensional poverty measurement method (2009), where income is a necessary but not enough condition of security and none vulnerability. "Latent-class models" are built based upon the Coneval's Rights and Well-being indicators that identified the ratio of population that could be considered middle classes. Five categories are obtained: population in multidimensional poverty, vulnerable population by income, vulnerable population due to social deprivation, middle classes and rich population. Results: Among the main findings, there is evidence that Mexico continues to be a country of poor, rather than middle class people. The number of people in poverty is 2.3 times greater than that of middle class, while the status and conditions of life guaranteeing security and not economic vulnerability, characteristic of the middle class, is only due for a little more of a quarter of the total population, 27.5%. This paper presents findings on the evolution of the middle class, which grows between 2000-2006, before the food and economic-financial crisis of 2006 and 2008, but never reaches levels above 50%. After crisis years, it begins its descent again to levels similar to 1994, showing its vulnerability to economic crisis. Conclusions: As a conclusion sustainability of middle classes over time in Mexico depends both on an effective and efficient policy to fight against poverty, and on specific policy about middle classes, which actually in Mexico and Latin American countries does not exist. This means that the broadest layers of the population, in the same way as in developed countries, have access to a living wage that guarantees well-being, effective health services, quality education, access to the credit market and financial services, as well as adequate and dignified pension system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the effect of the increase in female employment on income distribution in Uruguay between 1991 and 2012. In particular, this paper studies the impact on inequality and poverty. The methodology employed is a micro-decomposition proposed by Bourguignon et al. (1998). This methodology allows to partially capture the effect of the increase on female employment and to distinguish between effects generated by changes in employment status and those produced by changes in worked hours. Results suggest that, the increase in female employment has had statistically significant effects, despite not being the most important when it comes to explaining the evolution of income distribution. Changes in female employment contributed to reducing poverty levels throughout the period studied and, although it had modest results on de concentration of income at the beginning of the period, effects were more pronounced towards the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The Social Infrastructure Fund (FAIS), created since 1998, is a conditional transfer distributed by the Mexican federal government between state and municipal governments to reduce poverty. The assignation formula used until 2013, distributed the Fund according to the relative poverty of each state in relation to the national poverty. This design did not generate the appropriate incentives to reduce poverty. Methods: Based on a principal-agent model, and explicitly acknowledging the informational asymmetry between the federal and sub national levels of government, in this paper we propose a formula to assign the Fund, which has two fundamental characteristics: the FAIS is distributed using the relative poverty of states / municipalities; and includes a component to avoid the perverse incentive of the formula used until 2013. Results: A mechanism is designed and used as the theoretical basis to construct a formula to assign the transfer. Conclusions: In order to achieve the proposed impact of the governmental programs financed with federal transfers, it is important to design and implement the mechanisms to align the incentives of the different governmental levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Poverty remains one of the major international challenges as reflected in the commitments adopted by the United Nations in the 2030 Agenda. In order to fight against it, international development agencies have fostered decentralization reforms that have been applied throughout the world. This means that, the analysis of the effects of fiscal decentralization on poverty has become a research area of extraordinary academic interest, but one that has produced conflicting findings. This paper aims to analyse the effect on poverty of fiscal decentralization of spending in education, health, housing, and social protection. Methods: We estimate a fixed effect model by Feasible Generalized Least Square (FGLS) using unbalanced panel data of countries. Results: The decentralization of spending has a differentiated effect on poverty: the decentralization of health and housing policies contributes to reduce poverty, while the decentralization of social protection spending stimulates an increase in poverty. Conclusions: The hypothesis of the classical theory on decentralization is endorsed in the areas of health and housing. On the other hand, the prediction of the normative theory of the public economy is ratified in the area of the social protection. So, for each country, which social policies to decentralize and the allocation of resources among jurisdictions should be analysed with great detail to avoid problems of targeting strategy, accountability and responsibility assignments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Using standard fiscal incidence analysis and the new methodological developments by the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) Institute, this paper estimates the impact of fiscal policy on inequality and poverty in sixteen countries in Latin America around 2010. Methods: With information on incomes, consumption, and other dimensions available in household surveys, and knowledge about the characteristics of the fiscal system, the CEQ method consists in allocating to each individual the burden of personal income and consumption taxes, and the benefits from cash transfers, consumption subsidies, and government spending on education and health. This process yields the pre-fiscal and post-fiscal income concepts of interest. These income concepts, in turn, are used to calculate the corresponding indicators of inequality and poverty. Thus, one can estimate, for each country, the impact of the fiscal system and each of its components on inequality and poverty. Since the methodology that was applied is the same, results are comparable across countries. Results: The countries that redistribute the most are Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Uruguay. Guatemala, Honduras, and Peru are the countries that redistribute the least. Fiscal policy reduces extreme (income) poverty in twelve out of the sixteen countries. The incidence of poverty after taxes, subsidies, and cash transfers, however, is higher than market income poverty in Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, even though fiscal policy reduces inequality in these four countries. Contributory pensions have a heterogeneous effect on inequality and, contrary to some expectations, their impact is equalizing in nine of the countries. In the sixteen countries, spending on pre-school and primary education is equalizing and pro-poor (per capita benefits decline with income per capita). Spending on secondary education is always equalizing; it is also pro-poor in some of the countries. Spending on tertiary education is never pro-poor but it is equalizing in all the countries except for Guatemala. Spending on health is always equalizing but pro-poor only in some countries. Conclusions: Latin America presents a great deal of heterogeneity in the size of the state and the countries' capacity to use their fiscal power to reduce inequality and poverty. A higher share of social spending (to GDP) is associated with a larger redistributive effect but countries with similar, or even lower, shares of social spending show heterogeneous redistributive effects implying that other factors beyond size such as the composition and targeting of social spending (and taxes) are at play. It is important to emphasize that a higher redistributive effect is not necessarily a desirable outcome since in this article there is no estimation of the impact of redistributive policy on fiscal sustainability and efficiency. In some countries, the burden of consumption taxes is such that a portion of the poor are net payers into the fiscal system (before receiving "in kind" transfers in education and health). Governments should examine whether this undesirable effect could be avoided, or at least reduced, through an expansion of targeted cash transfers and/or reduction in the consumption taxes that are particularly burdensome for the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys the recent literature on the methodologies that have been used to evaluate the distributive and poverty effects of trade liberalization in Latin America. Our survey classifies the large number of papers on the subject according to the welfare measure they use: inequality (on wages and household income) or poverty. Our survey shows that a sound methodological approach evaluating the welfare effects of trade liberalization should take into account: the degree of tariff to price transmission, all income sources (not only wages), employment effects, gender and regional heterogeneity of the impact of trade, and second-order as well as general equilibrium effects. Two methodologies represent the latest efforts in this direction: (1) Income generation models with an explicit relationship between changes in tariff and changes in household real income (Porto, 2007), which are capable of testing the different transmission channels linking trade policy and inequality and poverty; (2) The Macro-Micro approach (Bourguingon et al, 2008), which combines a CGE with a micro-simulation model, evaluates the welfare effects of trade policy, taking into account general equilibrium effects. These two approaches can be combined to get the short- and long-term welfare effects of trade policy, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this paper is to present fuzzy sets theory as a reliable and straightforward methodology to measure poverty, which offers comparative advantages with respect to traditional methods. This paper also shows that fuzzy sets methodology is compatible with census data information to compute poverty indexes. Results of measuring poverty at state, municipal and town levels are presented for the case of Mexico and are compared with official results. Comparison reveals that fuzzy sets theory is an alternative that solve some of the methodological problems present in poverty lines and marginalization indexes, which makes it a helpful tool to evaluate and implement policies aimed at tackling poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the theoretical and operational criteria followed by El Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social (The National Council for Evaluation of the Social Development Policy, Coneval) to define the methodology for measuring multidimensional poverty. The multidimensional methodology was launched in 2009 and establishes the way in which poverty is officially identified and measured in Mexico. The methodology is illustrated with data for 2010 and 2012. This form of measurement has three characteristics that make it different from other methods. First, this approach uses a multidimensional method based on universal social rights. Second, unlike other theoretical-methodological paradigms for multidimensional poverty measurement that combine all dimensions into a single index, the identification of people in poverty, under this perspective, uses a bivariate Euclidian space measure. Income is evaluated on the first space, while a number of social deprivations are quantified on the second space. Third, the methodology classifies the population into different groups according to their poverty or vulnerable status, which helps to recommend differentiated public policy strategies and actions for each economic and social dimension. This allows more efficiency not only in targeting the poor but also in distributing social budgets. A fourth element, shared with other approaches, refers to the possibility of disaggregating the poverty measure for different groups of populations, such as, age, sex, ethnicity and territorial level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents empirical evidence that allows us to understand how does the welfare level of beneficiary households of the conditional cash transfer program Oportunidades evolve, both in the short and in the medium term. Understanding this evolution is relevant in order to design efficient exit mechanisms for this type of programs -something that concerns at least 27 conditional cash transfer programs worldwide. Using administrative data of the universe of beneficiary households, we study changes in welfare levels of rural and urban households in the short and medium term. Furthermore, recognizing that the evolution of each household's welfare level might be heterogeneous, we analyze the paths different types of households have followed over time. Our results confirm the existence of heterogeneity in the evolution of welfare levels among households. The data shows that poorer households have achieved greater improvements in their welfare level than (relatively) better off households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few ideas and activities have received as hyperbolic praise as that presented by Hernando de Soto on informality. Nobel laureates in economics, presidents of various countries, important magazines, and multilateral organizations have endorsed this author's impulse towards the official registration of the property or the poor, particularly, their homes, as the key to launching a worldwide economic revolution from below. In this paper we present the institutional backing of those ideas, the analytic substance behind the main arguments involved, the descriptive accuracy of the institutions operating in the Third World, and the results of their application. In this way, we evaluate the relationship between the spread and power of an idea and its formal content, and its effectiveness in changing the world of the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies Mexican poverty levels by state during the 1992-2002 period, in order to evaluate the effect that the business cycle and governmental policies have had on poverty levels. We find that behind the business cycle and the urban poverty are inversely related and that institutional transfers reduce poverty both in urban and rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]