Poverty and Distributional Impact of Economic Policies and External Shocks : : Three Case Studies from Latin America Combining Macro and Micro Approaches.

• Author: Lay, Jann.
• Place / Publishing House: Frankfurt am Main : : Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften,, 2007.; ©2007.
• Year of Publication: 2007
• Edition: First edition.
• Language: English
• Series: Goettinger Studien zur Entwicklungsoekonomik / Goettingen Studies in Development Economics.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (154 pages)

Economists have had much to say about the impact of economic policies on growth, but little on their distributional consequences and poverty impact. The reorientation of development policy from structural adjustment to poverty reduction as the central objective thus called for new tools to examine distributional change. This book analyzes the poverty and distributional impact of policy changes and external shocks in three case studies from Latin America: Trade liberalization in Colombia and Brazil, and the gas boom in Bolivia. It uses an innovative approach that combines computable general equilibrium and microsimulation models. The country applications illustrate that distributional consequences depend very much on the nature of the shock or policy change as well as the characteristics of the country in question. The book issues a warning against policy prescriptions being based on oversimplifying assumptions and models.

Table of Contents

Cover -- 1. General introduction and main findings -- 2. The poverty and distributional impact of "opening-up": Urban Colombia in the early 1990s -- 2.1. Introduction -- 2.2. Colombia in the early 1990s: "Apertura" and a non-tradable boom -- 2.3. Capturing the transmission channels: Methodology -- 2.4. The poverty and distributional impact of "Apertura" -- 2.5. Conclusions -- 2.6. Appendices -- 2.6.1. Additional figures -- 2.6.2. Additional tables -- 3. Resource booms, inequality, and poverty: The case of gas in Bolivia -- 3.1. Introduction -- 3.2. The gas boom and other resource shocks -- 3.3. The modelling framework -- 3.3.1. The CGE model -- 3.3.2. The microsimulation model -- 3.4. Results -- 3.4.1. Stylized simulations for link variables -- 3.4.2. Gas shock simulations -- 3.5. Concluding remarks -- 3.6. Appendices -- 3.6.1. Additional figures -- 3.6.2. Additional tables -- 4. Structural change and poverty reduction in Brazil: The impact of the Doha Round -- 4.1. Introduction -- 4.2. Background and motivation -- 4.3. The modeling framework -- 4.3.1. The macro model -- 4.3.2. The micro model -- 4.4. Brazil in the next decade: How trade policy affects a Business as Usual scenario? -- 4.4.1. The Business as Usual macro results -- 4.4.2. Distributional and poverty results for the BaU -- 4.4.3. Macro results for the full liberalization and the Doha trade policy shocks -- 4.4.4. Trade scenarios' distributional and poverty results -- 4.5. Conclusions -- 4.6. Appendices -- 4.6.1. Additional tables -- 5. Conclusions, policy relevance, and future research -- 6. References.