The Dominance Approach to Poverty Analysis : An Application to Uruguay

In the last two decades, the interest in learning about the poverty levels of the different countries has reflected growing concern. This has been partly due to the economic recession and the high rates of unemployment that the western economies have gone through during that period, and partly, because the 80s has proved to be a difficult decade for many developing countries, especially for Latin America where there has been an increase in both the total number of poor people and its percentage in relation to total population. In the context of Latin America, the case of Uruguay presents some peculiarities of its own. It is a small country (of over three million people) which presents acceptable levels of infrastructure, a public sanitary and educational system and which has been historically known for having some of the best levels of social indicators in the continent (both for per capita income and for poverty and inequality). In the present paper we aim to apply the methodology developed by Jenkins and Lambert (1997) to the study of poverty evolution in urban Uruguay between 1991 and 1997. To do so we shall make use of the information supplied by Continuous Household Surveys conducted by the Statistics National Institute in Uruguay