Multidimensional Poverty in Brazil in the Early 21st Century – Evidence from the Demographic Census
Thu, 24 February, 2022
11:00am - 12:15pm
Monday, February 28th, 2022
11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. ET
via Zoom
We were pleased to invite you to a joint virtual event with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Human Development Report Office (HDRO) on February 28, 2022 with panelist remarks from Adriana Stankiewicz Serra, a Research Associate at the Institute of Economics of the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil, and discussant remarks from Iñaki Permanyer, an ICREA Research Professor working at the Center for Demographic Studies (CED) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
The paper examines multidimensional poverty in Brazil in 2000 and 2010, based on the microdata of the Demographic Censuses. Our analysis is disaggregated into five classes of municipalities according to their degree of urbanisation and remoteness, highlighting wide rural–urban inequalities in the levels and dynamics of poverty. We compare estimates of traditional monetary poverty with multidimensional poverty measures based on two methods: (i) the Alkire-Foster counting identification approach; and (ii) the Permanyer two-stage poverty identification approach. The two-stage approach introduces the concepts of complementarity/substitutability within and across poverty dimensions, which enables a more precise identification of the population targeted by anti-poverty policies. All methods highlight substantial progress in poverty alleviation. In absolute terms, the reduction in the incidence of multidimensional poverty was significantly larger in the initially poorest areas—rural and intermediate municipalities, as well as those in the North and North–East regions. Important advances were made in standard of living, especially in the access to electricity, durable consumer goods and private bathrooms in the households in rural and intermediate municipalities. However, remote municipalities remain relatively poorer from any perspective, facing more difficulties in reducing monetary poverty.
About the Speaker
Adriana Stankiewicz Serra is a Research Associate at the Institute of Economics of the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil.
About the Discussant
Iñaki Permanyer, an ICREA Research Professor working at the Center for Demographic Studies (CED) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.