Identification of Sources of Variation in Poverty Outcomes

Essama-Nssah, B.

关键词: ACCOUNTING;    AGRICULTURE;    BENCHMARK;    BUDGET CONSTRAINTS;    CDF;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-5954
RP-ID  :  WPS5954

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

The international community has declaredpoverty reduction one of the fundamental objectives ofdevelopment, and therefore a metric for assessing theeffectiveness of development interventions. This creates theneed for a sound understanding of the fundamental factorsthat account for observed variations in poverty outcomeseither over time or across space. Consistent with the viewthat such an understanding entails deeper micro empiricalwork on growth and distributional change, this paper reviewsexisting decomposition methods that can be used to identifysources of variation in poverty. The maintained hypothesisis that the living standard of an individual is a pay-offfrom her participation in the life of society. In thatsense, individual outcomes depend on endowments, behaviorand the circumstances that determine the returns to thoseendowments in any social transaction. To identify thecontribution of each of these factors to changes in poverty,the statistical and structural methods reviewed in thispaper all rely on the notion of ceteris paribus variation.This entails the comparison of an observed outcomedistribution to a counterfactual obtained by changing onefactor at a time while holding all the other factors constant.