Intertemporal Pro-Poorness

Abstract

A long-lasting scientific and policy debate queries the impact of growth on distribution. A specific branch of the micro-oriented literature, known as 'pro-poor growth', seeks in particular to understand the impact of growth on poverty. Much of that literature supposes that the distributional impact should be measured in an anonymous fashion. The income dynamics and mobility impacts of growth are thus ignored. The paper extends this framework in two important manners. First, the paper uses an 'intertemporal pro-poorness' formulation that accounts separately for anonymous and mobility growth impacts. Second, the paper's treatment of mobility encompasses both the benefit of "mobility as equalizer" and the variability cost of poverty transiency. Several decompositions are proposed to measure the importance of each of these impacts of growth on the pro-poorness of distributional changes. The framework is applied to panel data on 23 European countries drawn from the 'European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions' (EU-SILC) survey.Keywords: pro-poorness, income mobility, growth, poverty dynamics.JEL Classification: D31, D63, I32 * We are very grateful to Philippe Van Kerm and Roberto Zelli for helpful suggestions and comments.

What’s behind pro-poor growth? An investigation of its drivers and dynamics

“…The year 2000 marks the transition from the autocratic rule of Suharto, the recovery from the Asian financial crisis, the beginning of a process of decentralization, and, subsequently, the commodity boom -four different economic, political, and social events that arguably had an impact on people's lives and so on their income trajectories. Several studies (e.g., Bresson et al 2017;Grimm 2007;Lo Bue and Palmisano 2020), including the present one, have shown that there has been growth in this period and that the incidence of growth has been larger among the initially poor. But why do the poor exhibit higher growth rates than those individuals initially belonging to richer percentiles?…”

Evaluating Patterns of Income Growth when Status Matters: A Robust Approach

“…Second, the framework proposed in this paper could be extended to endorse an intertemporal perspective, as recently explored in Bresson et al . (), which does not simply compare in a non‐anonymous fashion the initial and the final periods, but is able to account for the income and status variation of individuals between these two periods. These extensions will be the subject of future research.…”

Evaluating Patterns of Income Growth When Status Matters: A Robust Approach

“…the class of SEFs constructed as in(4) and with social weight functions satisfying Properties 1.Ŵ 1,2 is the class of SEFs constructed as in (4) and with social weight functions satisfying Properties 1 and 2.Ŵ 1,3 is the class of SEFs constructed as in (4) and with social weight functions satisfying Properties 1 and 3. Ŵ 1,4 is the class of SEFs constructed as in (4) and with social weight functions satisfying Properties 1 and 4.…”