This paper proposes a non-parametric adaptation of a recently developed parametric technique to produce point estimates of intra-generational economic mobility in the absence of panel data sets that follow individuals over time.
... See More + The method predicts past individual income or consumption using time-invariant observable characteristics, which allows the estimation of mobility into and out of poverty, as well as household-level income or consumption growth, from cross-sectional data. The paper validates this method by sampling repeated cross-sections out of actual panel data sets from three countries in the Latin America region and comparing the technique with mobility from panels. Overall, the method performs well in the three settings; with few exceptions, all estimates fall within the 95 percent confidence intervals of the panel mobility. The quality of the estimates does not depend in general on the sophistication level of the underlying welfare model's specifications. The results are encouraging even for those specifications that include few time-invariant variables as regressors.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8220 OCT 16, 2017
Due to its great expansion of access to education over the last decades, LAC is a top performer in absolute intergenerational mobility. More children are going to school for longer than their parents before them.
... See More + However, the region does not compare well to other regions in terms of relative mobility. That is, those born to the least educated parents are significantly more likely to become the least educated in their own generations. This pattern of high absolute mobility but low relative mobility is unique to LAC. The reason seems to be that, while overall investments in education have resulted in across the board gains in schooling access, inequities between groups have not been successfully addressed. Socioeconomic background has a larger impact on students’ test scores in LAC countries than in countries in other regions. Progress has been made on this front as the importance of socioeconomic differences in determining test scores fell more for LAC than other countries in recent years, suggesting the region is catching up.
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Due to its great expansion of access to education over the last decades, LAC is a top performer in absolute intergenerational mobility. More children are going to school for longer than their parents before them.
... See More + However, the region does not compare well to other regions in terms of relative mobility. That is, those born to the least educated parents are significantly more likely to become the least educated in their own generations. This pattern of high absolute mobility but low relative mobility is unique to LAC. The reason seems to be that, while overall investments in education have resulted in across the board gains in schooling access, inequities between groups have not been successfully addressed. Socioeconomic background has a larger impact on students’ test scores in LAC countries than in countries in other regions. Progress has been made on this front as the importance of socioeconomic differences in determining test scores fell more for LAC than other countries in recent years, suggesting the region is catching up.
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Due to its great expansion of access to education over the last decades, LAC is a top performer in absolute intergenerational mobility. More children are going to school for longer than their parents before them.
... See More + However, the region does not compare well to other regions in terms of relative mobility. That is, those born to the least educated parents are significantly more likely to become the least educated in their own generations. This pattern of high absolute mobility but low relative mobility is unique to LAC. The reason seems to be that, while overall investments in education have resulted in across the board gains in schooling access, inequities between groups have not been successfully addressed. Socioeconomic background has a larger impact on students’ test scores in LAC countries than in countries in other regions. Progress has been made on this front as the importance of socioeconomic differences in determining test scores fell more for LAC than other countries in recent years, suggesting the region is catching up.
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This paper introduces a novel corporate financial vulnerability index that tracks financial conditions of the non-financial corporate sector. Using the balance sheet information of 14,207 listed non-financial firms in 69 emerging markets and developing economies, the index shows that, at the global level, corporate vulnerability sharply increased since 2013 and stabilized in 2016.
... See More + Regional trends are more heterogeneous, pointing to significant corporate vulnerabilities in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as a deterioration of firms' financial conditions in Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa in recent years. The energy sector has exhibited the fastest deterioration, especially since 2014, in part driven by the decline in oil prices. However, if currently relatively benign global funding conditions and higher commodity prices endure, companies may have an opportunity to strengthen their balance sheets. The paper also finds that the index has leading indicator properties for socioeconomic outcomes, such as a rise in unemployment and an economic recession, and outperforms a commonly used "debt at risk" approach.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8198 SEP 19, 2017
Feyen,Erik H.B.; Fiess,Norbert Matthias; Zuccardi Huertas,Igor Esteban; Lambert,Lara Alice VictoriaDisclosed
Government strategies for setting energy prices are not uniform across the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region—or even across fuels. Instead, they cover a full spectrum, ranging from discretionary price-fixing at one end to pure market-based approaches at the other.
... See More + In between is a wide variety of other schemes such as price stabilization funds, import or export parity pricing, price smoothing through tax levels, and targeted direct price subsidies or vouchers. Governments in the LAC region, however, tend to be small as measured by government revenues as a percentage of GDP. So their limited government resources have to be used wisely and be better targeted to the poor and vulnerable. Although energy subsidies are an inefficient policy tool for protecting the welfare of the poor, energy price increases can have a big impact on these households.Energy Pricing Policies for Inclusive Growth in Latin America and the Caribbean finds that energy subsidies are highly regressive in an absolute sense—that is, the lion’s share of every dollar spent on keeping energy prices low benefits wealthier households. However, subsidies for fuels that are widely used for cooking and heating—liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), natural gas, and kerosene—as well as for electricity, can be relatively neutral or progressive, implying that lower-income households capture benefits that are proportionate to their expenditures. In other words, although poorer households receive very little from every dollar spent on energy subsidies, that small amount may represent an important share of their expenditures. It is important, then, that governments expand the coverage and depth of their social safety nets to provide relief for poor households if energy prices rise. This report also finds that aggregate price impacts and the competitiveness effects of energy price increases are moderate to small and can be smoothed out through macropolicy responses.
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