Nº 242 (February, 2019). Lucila Venturi Grosso

The objective of the paper is to study the intra-generational mobility of income and poverty in Argentina to understand the reasons of the stagnation in the pace of poverty reduction since 2011. Furthermore, the paper tries to characterize and quantify the movements of individuals, and therefore it analyzes poverty duration, consecutive versus transient poverty, and the probability of reentering poverty. To this effect, synthetic panel methodology is applied and two periods, which are characterized by different evolutions of the headcount ratio, are compared: 2004-2007 and 2011- 2014. The main results are four-fold: 1) the stagnation was driven by a lower exit poverty rate; 2) the individuals who are moving along the income distribution are the ones who were poor at the beginning of the periods under study; 3) in comparison with the first period, between 2011-2014 a higher proportion of individuals was poor for two or three years and transient poverty prevailed over consecutive poverty; and, 4) the probability of reentering poverty was higher during 2011-2014. Moreover, the paper validates the methodology by using the panel structure of Argentina´s household survey and estimates two of the most relevant parameters necessary to employ the synthetic panel approach.

JEL codes: : D31, I32, O15