1728) Brasil, India e China: estudo comparado da pobreza

A India deve ganhar esse concurso altamente duvidoso. Em todo caso, vale a pena consultar este trabalho, "pescado" no blog da economista chefe do Banco Mundial para a Ásia do Sul, Eliana Cardoso, professora brasileira.

The Poor and the Middle Class
Submitted by Eliana Cardoso on Tue, 12/08/2009 - 16:00

Start counting the poor in India and you are bound to get into controversy. In “A Comparative Perspective on Poverty Reduction in Brazil, China and India,” Martin Ravallion (October 2009) calculates that 42% of the population in India in 2005 lived in households with income per person below US$1.25 a day (converted using purchasing power parity exchange rates for consumption in 2005). But he finds only 20% of the population under the US$1.25 poverty line when using a different method as a sensitivity test. The difference is huge. One number is twice the other and corresponds to two hundred million people (more than the whole population of Brazil!).

Ravallion repeats the exercise and finds that in Brazil, in 2005, the population who lived in households with income per person below US$1.25 a day (converted using purchasing power parity exchange rates for consumption in 2005) is 8%. When using the alternative sensitivity test method, it is 10%. Compared to India, the difference is small (2% of the population) between the two measures.

I suspect that instead of trying to calculate the number of people with less than US$ 1.25 a day, policies for poverty reduction should focus on the bottom quintile of the population: the 20% poorest group in the country.

One of my reasons is that inequality matters. Think of poverty as a relationship.

Read more here.

A Comparative Perspective on Poverty Reduction in Brazil, China and India
Martin Ravallion (October 2009)
Article in The Economist
Paper, World Bank

Author: Ravallion, Martin ;
Document Date: 2009/10/01
Document Type: Policy Research Working Paper
Report Number: WPS5080

Abstract
Brazil, China and India have seen falling poverty in their reform periods, but to varying degrees and for different reasons. History left China with favorable initial conditions for rapid poverty reduction through market-led economic growth; at the outset of the reform process there were ample distortions to remove and relatively low inequality in access to the opportunities so created, though inequality has risen markedly since. By concentrating such opportunities in the hands of the better off, prior inequalities in various dimensions handicapped poverty reduction in both Brazil and India. Brazil's recent success in complementing market-oriented reforms with progressive social policies has helped it achieve more rapid poverty reduction than India, although Brazil has been less successful in terms of economic growth. In the wake of its steep rise in inequality, China might learn from Brazil's success with such policies. India needs to do more to assure that poor people are able to participate in both the country's growth process and its social policies; here there are lessons from both China and Brazil. All three countries have learned how important macroeconomic stability is to poverty reduction.

In pdf version.