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We are pleased to announce the publication of IPC Working Paper #42, “Growth, Poverty and Employment in Brazil, Chile and Mexico”. The authors, Eduardo Zepeda, Diana Alarcon, Fabio Soares Veras and Rafael Osorio, use household data from the early 1990s to the early 2000s in these three countries to a) examine the trends in labour income per capita as a result of changes in earnings per worker and the employment/population rate and b) determine whether the patterns of change were pro-poor or not. They also further decompose the employment-population rate into the unemployment, participation and availability rates. They find that earnings trends were more powerful than employment trends in explaining changes in labour income. They also find that out of the total of eight country periods that they reviewed, only three exhibited a pro-poor pattern of change in labour income but two of these occurred during economic contractions. The authors also note that 1) poor workers would have suffered more if they had not significantly boosted their participation in labour markets in response to downturns but 2) such workers benefited less than proportionately from economic expansions compared to non-poor workers



Available online at: http://www.undp-povertycentre.org/pub/IPCWorkingPaper42.pdf


For a related IPC publication, see Working Paper #40, “Addressing the Employment-Poverty Nexus in Kenya”.





Other IPC publications at: http://www.undp-povertycentre.org/ipcpublications.htm