Reducing Poverty Intensity

What Alternative Poverty Measures Reveal about the Impact of Brazil's Bolsa Família

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2991006
AutoresRussell Bither-Terry (Film Independent, autor de correspondencia)
Año2014
Volumen56
Número4
Páginas143-158
Fecha de publicación2014-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLatin American Politics and Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1531-426X • E-ISSN: 1548-2456
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1111/j.1548-2456.2014.00252.x
OpenAlexW2048463301
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas17

Brazil's conditional cash transfer program Bolsa Família (Family Allowance) has gained a worldwide reputation as an effective antipoverty program. However, studies applying the dominant headcount poverty measure, which counts the percentage of households falling below a given poverty line, only credit the program with a first-order reduction in poverty (and extreme poverty) of 0.15 to 1.88 percentage points. This raises the puzzle of how such a modest impact could lead to Bolsa Família's political popularity. This article argues that Bolsa Família does dramatically reduce poverty, but measuring this impact requires thinking of poverty as how far a household is from meeting its basic human needs; choosing a continuous variable; and using income gap, intensity, and ordinal measures that reflect this conceptualization. The more substantial reduction of poverty intensity helps explain the program's reputation

Conditional cash transfer · Demographic economics · Development economics · Economic growth · Economics · Political science · Popularity · Poverty · Income, Poverty, and Inequality · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare · Social and Economic Development in India