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Countries are increasingly interested in having an official multidimensional poverty index (MPI). This is the expression of a growing consensus regarding the limitations of income poverty measures as standalone indicator. This paper analyses the challenges in designing such indices. Specifically, it addresses the selection of the unit of identification, the selection of dimensions and indicators, including the issue of missing values and the debate on whether to include an indicator of monetary deprivation or not, the weighting structure and the poverty cutoff. In general, for all the reviewed…
This report offers a review of 14 non-monetary indicators of poverty to monitor progress towards the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) “End poverty in all its forms everywhere”. The reviewed indicators are housing materials, overcrowding, housing tenure, durable goods, access to safe water and improved sanitation, access to clean sources of energy, garbage collection and nearby sources of contamination, (public) transportation, child attendance to school and adult schooling, employment, social security and access to health care.…
In the first quarter of 2018, the U.S. economy grew at an annualized rate of 2%, a slower pace than previously thought, but growth is expected to rebound in the current quarter. Growth was held back by the slowdown in consumer spending, which grew only 0.9% in the first quarter, after a 4% growth in the fourth quarter of last year. U.S. employers added 1,287,000 jobs during the first half of 2018. Unemployment rate was at 4% at the end of June. Compared with its pace before the 2008 recession, productivity growth is disappointingly slow. On a year-ago basis, unit labor costs were up 1.1% in th…
The U.S. economic expansion remains on track and it has entered its ninth year. January marked the 103th month of growth for the U.S. economy. By May, the current economic expansion will become the second longest on record.1 The unemployment rate sits at 4.1%, the lowest level since December 2000, suggesting the economy has reached, or nearly reached, full capacity.…
The Preliminary Overview of the Economies of Latin America and the Caribbean, one of ECLAC’s most important annual reports, analyzes in its 2017 edition the economic performance of the region throughout the year, the international context and macroeconomic policies implemented by countries, while also providing an outlook for 2018.…