Intertemporal pro-poorness
A
long-lasting scientific and policy debate queries the impact of growth on
distribution. A specific branch of the micro-oriented literature, known as ‘pro-poor
growth’, seeks in particular to understand the impact of growth on poverty.
Much of that literature supposes that the distributional impact should be
measured in an anonymous fashion. The income dynamics and mobility impacts of
growth are thus ignored. The paper extends this framework in two important
manners. First, the paper uses an ‘intertemporal pro-poorness’ formulation that
accounts separately for anonymous and mobility growth impacts. Second, the
paper’s treatment of mobility encompasses both the benefit of “mobility as
equalizer” and the variability cost of poverty transiency. Several
decompositions are proposed to measure the importance of each of these impacts
of growth on the pro-poorness of distributional changes. The framework is
applied to panel data on 23 European countries drawn from the ‘European Union
Statistics on Income and Living Conditions’ (EU-SILC) survey.
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