Despite the recovery of economic growth in Latin America during the 1990s, rising unemployment, high informality rates and sluggish wages lie at the root of high inequality and poverty. This paper looks at changes in hourly earnings from the early 1990s to the early 2000s in three relatively...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the length of poverty spells and its determinants. We analyze if short-term changes in the labor market affect the probability of staying in poverty. On the assumption that poverty transitions occur more frequently when we use a monthly data rather than...

"Fortunately, both poverty and extreme poverty have shown a significant decrease in Brazil. According to data from the National Household Sample Survey (Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios - PNAD), poverty dropped over 20 per cent between 2004 and 2013, to about 9 per cent of the...

Social protection policy in Brazil is a historically built patchwork of programmes that pay different values to people in the same situation, leaves many unprotected (in particular, 17 million children) and is fraught with duplications and other inefficiencies. This paper proposes an approach...