The Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Alicia Bárcena, stressed the urgency of transforming privileges into rights to put an end to inequality, poverty and migration, which are the basis of social disenchantment in the region today, while she delivered a keynote speech in the framework of the Central American Integration System (SICA) Regional Forum 2019, which is taking place through Thursday, December 5 in El Salvador.
The senior United Nations official made a presentation entitled Regional Integration and Prospects for Central America…
For over three decades, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has performed measurements of poverty in the Latin American countries in order to estimate its prevalence in the region using a common methodology. Economic and social changes have prompted an update of the thresholds used to quantify poverty and a review of certain aspects of the methodology.
Now that all the countries of the region have progressed towards having official poverty measurements calculated by their own public agencies, the figures produced by ECLAC aim to provide a regional overview that …
The future availability of a new Household Spending and Income Survey for Uruguay will enable the assessment of a new official measurement of income poverty in the country. In light of this process, ECLAC’s office in Montevideo edited a new publication that explores the different options for its construction.
The document, Measurement of Monetary Poverty in Uruguay: Concepts, Methodologies, Evaluation and Alternatives (No. 37 in the Studies and Perspectives Series by ECLAC’s Office in Montevideo, in Spanish only), reviews the available methodological options and the influence that some of thes…
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…