Panama Poverty Assessment : Translating Growth into Opportunities and Poverty Reduction
Panama is one of the richest and fastest growing economies in Latin America; however it is considered a country of stark contrasts and, for some of its citizens, abysmal poverty. Large disparities in extreme poverty, poverty, and in other measures...
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Format: | Poverty Assessment |
Language: | English en_US |
Published: |
Washington, DC
2013
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Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2011/06/16465530/panama-poverty-assessment-translating-growth-opportunities-poverty-reduction http://hdl.handle.net/10986/12671 |
Summary: | Panama is one of the richest and fastest
growing economies in Latin America; however it is considered
a country of stark contrasts and, for some of its citizens,
abysmal poverty. Large disparities in extreme poverty,
poverty, and in other measures of human development exist
among its citizens. This chapter examines the trends in
economic growth, inequality and poverty in Panama between
1997 and 2008 at both the national level and by region,
ethnicity and gender. It presents characterization of the
patterns of consumption growth across the consumption
distribution (including whether the growth is
'pro-poor'). Next, it examines the role of
internal migration flows in explaining shifts in poverty and
extreme poverty between rural and urban areas. Lastly, the
chapter begins to analyze the inequality of access to basic
opportunities among children using the Human Opportunity
Index (HOI). The Human Opportunity Index (HOI) is an
operational measure of opportunities that takes into account
both coverage and the distribution of access to basic goods
and services by children, who cannot be held accountable for
pre-determined circumstances at birth such as their race,
gender, family income, parents' education level, or
place of residence. The study is based on
nationally-representative Living Standards Measurement
Surveys (LSMS), which were conducted in 1997, 2003 and 2008.
The LSMS household questionnaire includes quantitative data
on various aspects of living conditions, including household
structure, housing, infrastructure, health, nutrition,
education and training, economic activity (labor),
migration, spending and consumption, income, savings,
credit, independent business activities, and agriculture.
Since the latest available information is for 2008, the
poverty numbers presented here reflect the Panamanian
situation after the end of the period of high growth but
before the impact of the 2008-09 global financial crises.
With this latest dataset, there are now three comparable
household surveys that allow for the study of the evolution
of poverty in Panama between 1997, 2003, and 2008. |
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