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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Russell Bither-Terry
Russell Bither-Terry*
Affiliation:
russell.bitherterry@gmail.com
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Note
Information
Latin American Politics and Society , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , Winter 2014 , pp. 143 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 2014

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