Ten Findings about Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean

Approximately one in three people in Latin America and the Caribbean live in poverty and one in seven in extreme poverty. This paper provides an overview of who the poor are and how they live, using 18 recent household surveys from the region. It examines (1) how many people are poor, (2) how the poor are distributed geographically, (3) how poverty affects specific groups, (4) how much of the poverty in the region is chronic versus transitory, and (5) how poverty numbers have changed over time. Second, it identifies how the poor live. Specifically, it discusses (6) the living arrangements of the poor, (7) their assets, (8) how they earn their incomes, (9) how they access human capital services, and (10) their access to social safety nets. This descriptive analysis may be useful for targeting efforts and for generating hypotheses for poverty reduction that can be tested causally.

This paper is forthcoming in Economía (the LACEA journal).