Brazilian Poverty Between and Within Groups: Decomposing by Geographical Group-Specific Poverty Lines

This paper presents empirical findings by applying the reformulation of the FGT class of poverty measures provided by Bottiroli-Civardi and Chiappero-Martinetti (2004) to the Brazilian annual households survey, the Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra do Domicilios (PNAD) for 2002. Starting from a set of geographically-specific poverty lines, we compute poverty between and within these differentiated homogenous groups running two different exercises. First, we consider the whole Brazil and we find the between component is dominant due to the high heterogeneity of this set of poverty lines. Then, by considering separately each region, we find a dominance of the within component in the North and in the Central-West, while the between component is dominant in the remaining regions. These findings renew the importance of having a critical eye in interpreting synthetic indexes of poverty.