Do Changes in the Labour Market Take Families out of Poverty? Determinants of Exiting Poverty in Brazilian Metropolitan Regions

Type Journal Article - The Journal of Development Studies
Title Do Changes in the Labour Market Take Families out of Poverty? Determinants of Exiting Poverty in Brazilian Metropolitan Regions
Author(s)
Volume 46
Issue 9
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2010
Page numbers 1503-1522
URL http://www.webmeets.com/files/papers/LACEA-LAMES/2008/341/Lacea2008.pdf
Abstract
The objective of this paper is to estimate the likelihood of households exiting poverty and the determinants of this transition, taking into consideration the length of time that households spent in poverty. Our focus is to analyze, by means of estimating survival models, whether short-term changes in the labour market affect that probability. Data is from the Brazilian Monthly Employment Survey (PME), which was conducted from March 2002 to May 2007. Such a monthly dataset allows us to estimate the relationship between events and mobility more accurately than using annual data. However, since this survey follows households for a very short period of time, we had to adopt estimation techniques that control for cases of right- and left-censoring. The most important results in this paper are: 1) households that entered into poverty with zero income (namely, their poverty income gap was equal to one) are not those with the lowest probability of exiting this condition; 2) changes in aggregate unemployment do not directly affect poverty duration; and 3) the increase of average wage in the informal sector has a significant, positive effect on the probability of the poor leaving poverty.

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