This paper proposes a new Multidimensional Poverty Index for Latin America. The index combines monetary and non‐monetary indicators, updates deprivation cut‐offs for certain traditional unsatisfied basic needs indicators and includes some new indicators, aiming to maximize regional comparability within the data constraints. The index is estimated for 17 countries of the region at two points in time—one around 2005 and the other around 2012. Overall, we estimate about 28 percent of people are multidimensionally poor in 2012 in the region. We find statistically significant reductions of poverty in most countries, both in terms of incidence and intensity over the period under analysis. However, important disparities between rural and urban areas remain. Statistical scrutiny of the index suggests that it captures the state of poverty relatively well while maintaining a certain parsimony and being highly robust to changes in weights, indicators, and poverty cut‐off.

No abstract

Thi s article analyses the experience of five conditional cash transfer programmes established in Latin America to reduce poverty and increase human capital in the form of education, health and nutrition. These innovative programmes should help towards the Millennium Development Goals, and some have become pillars of their countries' anti-poverty efforts. The article begins by presenting some of the concepts that underlie conditional transfer programmes. It then goes on to examine the following experiences: the Bolsa Escola programme and the Programme for the Eradication of Child Labour (Brazil), Families in Action (Colombia), the Social Protection Network (Nicaragua) and the Oportunidades programme (Mexico), analysing their goals, components, targeting mechanisms, impact and efficiency. The article concludes by offering some policy recommendations and identifying design components that might serve as good practice when programmes of this kind are implemented.

We recently proposed a Multidimensional Poverty Index for the Latin America (MPI-LA) region implementing a broadly used methodology developed by Sabina Alkire and James Foster. The present note is a response to Hector Najera and David Gordon's paper (published in this volume), in which they claim that the MPI-AL is an 'unreliable measure of poverty' because it does not pass some statistical tests that they consider applicable to multidimensional poverty measurement. In this note we address each of their critiques in turn and explain why Najera and Gordon's claim is not correct.

Este trabajo examina de forma empírica la solidez de identificación de los pobres mediante tres tipos de análisis usando datos de 2012 de cinco países de América Latina. Los resultados sugieren que el método monetario y el multidimensional nomonetario por separado son insuficientes para identificar la pobreza de manera comprehensiva, que parece conveniente el uso de umbrales de pobreza intermedios en el índice multidimensional y que la tipificación de grupos de pobreza hacia adentro de los países es sensible a la selección de dicho umbral. Lo anterior reafirma la necesidad de alcanzar consensos sobre la definición de pobreza en los países de la región.