This book examines poverty as a structural problem caused by the way economic systems operate. It poses a simple question: Why do poor people earn less? Case studies in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Peru find the poor caught in a vicious circle. They lack sufficient access to...

This book examines poverty as a structural problem caused by the way economic systems operate. It poses a simple question: Why do poor people earn less? Case studies in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Peru find the poor caught in a vicious circle. They lack sufficient access to...

In estimating the impact of migration on income and poverty, existing studies have typically overlooked the fact that migration changes the size of the household. The ‘corrected’ impact that takes the change in household size into account is presented analytically and is estimated on the...

This paper aims to identify whether or not the spatial concentration of poverty –also called economic residential segregation- affects the opportunities of the poor in Chile. Residential segregation is understood as the concentration particular population groups in determined geographical...

In many developing countries, remittance receipts from overseas are importantsupplements to household income. How do these remittance flows affect poverty andinequality in migrants’ home areas? To answer this question, we take advantage ofexogenous shocks to the remittance receipts of...

This paper contributes to understand the microeconomic determinants of household income dynamics in poverty and inequality in Chile during the 90’s . We use a microsimulation based on the decomposition of distributional changes, developed by Bourguignon et.al. (2000). We estimate a...

We estimate the “place premium”—the wage gain that accrues to foreign workers who arrive to work in the United States. First, we estimate the predicted, purchasing-power adjusted wages of people inside and outside the United States who are otherwise observably identical—with the same...