Page 245 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 3

CPS2010 Rodrigo L. et al.

Spatial and temporal trends in non-monetary
wealth in Latin America (1990-2010)
Rodrigo Lovatón, Sula Sarkar
Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation, University of Minnesota
Minneapolis-Minnesota, United States

Abstract
Research on poverty has been more often focused on monetary measures
such as household expenditures or income. In contrast, the use of non-
monetary indicators of wealth provides different insights about inequality and
development over time. In this paper, we examine spatial and temporal trends
in household wealth in 10 countries in Latin America through a non-monetary
approach. The analysis takes advantage of census micro data samples covering
the 1990, 2000, and 2010 rounds. We focus on a set of nine indicators that are
common across countries and census years. Preliminary results show progress
for the countries examined, but that is uneven and biased towards the
population residing in urban areas.

Keywords
poverty; assets; principal component analysis; census; IPUMS

1. Introduction
Poverty reduction remains an important public policy objective in Latin
America. In this paper, we analyze spatial and temporal trends in household
wealth in 10 countries in the region from an asset-based perspective. This
analytical approach has been extensively used when traditional monetary
measures such as household expenditures or income are not available, in a
similar manner to the early application developed by Filmer and Pritchett
(2001). Previous research on related topics for Latin America includes the
unsatisfied basic needs framework, development of multidimensional poverty
measures, and inequalities in human capital accumulation (e.g. Attanasio and
Székely, 1999; Hammill, 2009; Permanyer, 2013). This study intends to
specifically exploit the availability of various non-monetary indicators
collected in census microdata to assess changes in household wealth over a
relatively longer time period.
The analysis of poverty from a non-monetary approach has been
implemented in previous studies for Africa using data from the Demographic
and Health Surveys (DHS). Stifel, Sahn, and Younger (1999) examine different
poverty indicators across nine countries in Africa, finding mixed results in
terms of progress depending on the chosen variable. Sahn and Stifel (2000)
compare poverty at different points in time for various African countries using
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