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- Title
Reducing Poverty Intensity: What Alternative Poverty Measures Reveal About the Impact of Brazil's Bolsa Família.
- Authors
Bither-Terry, Russell
- Abstract
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.
- Subjects
BRAZIL; BOLSA Familia (Program); POVERTY reduction; POVERTY; GOVERNMENT policy; BRAZILIAN politics &; government, 2003-; INCOME; ECONOMIC policy
- Publication
Latin American Politics & Society, 2014, Vol 56, Issue 4, p143
- ISSN
1531-426X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1548-2456.2014.00252.x