The Dynamics of Growth, Poverty, and Inequality: A Panel Analysis of Regional Data from the Philippines and Thailand

We propose a new methodological framework to empirically analyze the dynamics of growth, poverty, and inequalitythat incorporates the fact that the entire distribution of a welfare indicator, say, real percapita consumption, changes over time, and that empirical variables for growth, poverty, and inequality are often compiled from the distribution of the welfare indicator. Empirical models derived from this framework are applied to a unique panel dataset of provinces in the Philippines (1985-2003) and Thailand (1988-2004), compiled from microdata on household expenditures. The system GMM estimation results suggest that inequality reduced the subsequent growth rate of percapita consumption in both countries and differences in inequality explain a substantial portion of the Philippine-Thai difference in growth and poverty reduction during the late 1980s and the 1990s.