Shielding the Poor presents a group of studies on social protection in the developing world from leading researchers. These studies address the issue of vulnerability of the poor to adverse shocks and propose policies to increase their protection and coping capacity. The studies emphasize the...

Shielding the Poor presents a group of studies on social protection in the developing world from leading researchers. These studies address the issue of vulnerability of the poor to adverse shocks and propose policies to increase their protection and coping capacity. The studies emphasize the...

This paper tests the sensitivity of poverty indexes to the choice of adult equivalence scales, assumptions about the existence of economies of scale in consumption, methods for treating missing and zero incomes, and different adjustments to handle income misreporting. We also perform sensitivity...

This paper tests the sensitivity of poverty indexes to the choice of adult equivalence scales, assumptions about the existence of economies of scale in consumption, methods for treating missing and zero incomes, and different adjustments to handle income misreporting. The sensitivity analysis is...

This paper uses Atkinson's and Foster and Shorrocks's approach to generate poverty orderings for different population groups in Mexico. The poverty is measured using a range of poverty lines valued from zero to an arbitrary maximum. Poverty is estimated using three poverty measures: the...

How much redistribution does Uruguay accomplish through social spending and taxes? How progressive are revenue collection and social spending? What could be done to further increase redistribution and improve redistributional effectiveness? A standard fiscal incidence analysis shows that Uruguay...

How much redistribution and poverty reduction is being accomplished in Latin America through social spending, subsidies, and taxes? Standard fiscal incidence analyses applied to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay using a comparable methodology yields the following results....

Between 2003 and 2009, Argentina’s social spending as a share of gross domestic product increased by 7.6 percentage points. Benefit incidence analysis for 2003, 2006, and 2009 suggests that the contribution of cash transfers to the reduction of disposable income inequality and poverty...

Guatemala is one of the most unequal countries in Latin America and has the highest incidence of poverty. The indigenous population is more than twice as likely of being poor than the nonindigenous group. Fiscal incidence analysis based on the 2009-2010 National Survey of Family Income and...