Nº 23 (May, 2005). Leonardo Gasparini & Martín Cicowiez.
“Meeting the poverty-reduction MDG in the southern cone”.
This paper assesses the likelihood of meeting the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015 in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. We simulate the poverty impact of changes in growth rates and redistributive policies, and trace the poverty consequences of various alternative economic scenarios using microeconometric decompositions. Sustainable and vigorous productivity growth seems to be a necessary condition to meet the poverty MDG by 2015 in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. The required growth rate could be significantly lower if some modest well-targeted redistribution could be performed. In contrast to its neighbors, Chile has already achieved the poverty MDG.