The Real Bottom Line: Benchmarking Performance in Poverty Reduction in Latin America and the Caribbean

John Newman, João Pedro Azevedo (), Jaime Saavedra and Ezequiel Molina

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper makes two contributions. First, it carries out an extensive analysis of episodes of poverty changes and documents the empirical distribution of poverty changes. This is useful for providing some context for assessing whether observed changes in poverty that a country may achieve are good, bad or indifferent and for guiding goals that might be set for poverty reduction. Second, the paper proposes and illustrates an approach to take account of country observable characteristics in assessing what constitutes good and poor performance for a specific country. The approach consists of comparing a country’s actual performance to counterfactual distributions generated using quantile regressions. The paper considers four cases where the type of benchmarking approach being proposed helps facilitate a policy dialogue.

Keywords: Poverty Reduction; Benchmarking; Millennium Development Goals; Economic Growth; Quantile Regression; Latin America and the Caribbean (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 C21 D8 H8 I32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-11, Revised 2010-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/85585/1/MPRA_paper_85585.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:85585

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().