Papers by José Espinoza-Delgado
Feminist Economics, Nov 29, 2023
Understanding why women are less financially literate than men is crucial for developing effectiv... more Understanding why women are less financially literate than men is crucial for developing effective policies that decrease gender inequalities and improve women’s financial literacy, agency, and empowerment. Accordingly, this article adopts a multidimensional approach to measuring financial literacy in developing countries, aggregating three key components of financial literacy, namely financial behavior, financial attitude, and financial knowledge. Using data from Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay, the study finds that there are statistically significant gender differences in these countries, which is confirmed, except in the case of Chile, by an extensive econometric analysis. In turn, a traditional Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition indicates, when considering the three countries as a whole, that 56 percent of the gap can be attributed to unexplained factors, while 44 percent to differences in observable characteristics, implying that men’s rates of return on human capital components, in a broad sense, are significantly different from those experienced by women.
Feminist Economics, 2023
Understanding why women are less financially literate than men is crucial for developing effectiv... more Understanding why women are less financially literate than men is crucial for developing effective policies that decrease gender inequalities and improve women’s financial literacy, agency, and empowerment. Accordingly, this article adopts a multidimensional approach to measuring financial literacy in developing countries, aggregating three key components of financial literacy, namely financial behavior, financial attitude, and financial knowledge. Using data from Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay, the study finds that there are statistically significant gender differences in these countries, which is confirmed, except in the case of Chile, by an extensive econometric analysis. In turn, a traditional Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition indicates, when considering the three countries as a whole, that 56 percent of the gap can be attributed to unexplained factors, while 44 percent to differences in observable characteristics, implying that men’s rates of return on human capital components, in a broad sense, are significantly different from those experienced by women.
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Mar 17, 2023
Universidad de Zaragoza, 2019
El compromiso por la erradicación de la pobreza en América Latina y el Caribe implica una acucios... more El compromiso por la erradicación de la pobreza en América Latina y el Caribe implica una acuciosa revisión, no sólo de los Programas y Políticas sociales implementados en la región, sino también de las definiciones y metodologías que de la pobreza se hagan y que sustentan tanto su identificación como su medición. De los enfoques con los que se entienda el problema depende en gran parte la evaluación de sus avances y retrocesos
Statistical Journal of the IAOS
From the onset, it was clear that the impact of the global economic and social crisis caused by t... more From the onset, it was clear that the impact of the global economic and social crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic was unlikely to affect all children equally. Thus, it was necessary to ascertain the impact of COVID-19 on child poverty as the events unfolded. Many of the indirect effects of the pandemic – disruptions to health services, delayed vaccination programmes, widespread school closures, and increases in food insecurity – have significant impacts on the realisation of children’s rights and, consequently, were expected to increase material deprivations across different dimensions. The question was by how much? In this article we explain the modelling and methodological approach to project or nowcast the answer to that question. The method is dynamic as it was revised as additional information emerged during 2020 and 2021.
Economic of Disaster and Climate Change, 2021
The impact of the global economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will not affect all chil... more The impact of the global economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will not affect all children equally: those in poorer households and children who are disadvantaged face the most serious consequences. As parents lose their jobs and incomes, the impact on children living in impoverished households must be measured. In this article, we assess the economic consequences of the pandemic on these children. Given that poorer families have a larger number of children than other families, the analysis first establishes the proportion of children living in monetary poor households, as defined by national standards, across developing countries. Then, using historical changes and trends of income distribution per country, the latest projections about economic decline due to the pandemic, and demographic information about the distribution of children by deciles, we estimate the expected increase in the number of children in monetary poor households in developing countries as of end of 2020 to be an additional 122-144 million and, at best, a moderate decline in these numbers by end of 2021.
Statistical Journal of the IAOS, 2022
From the onset, it was clear that the impact of the global economic and social crisis caused by t... more From the onset, it was clear that the impact of the global economic and social crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic was unlikely to affect all children equally. Thus, it was necessary to ascertain the impact of COVID-19 on child poverty as the events unfolded. Many of the indirect effects of the pandemic-disruptions to health services, delayed vaccination programmes, widespread school closures, and increases in food insecurity-have significant impacts on the realisation of children's rights and, consequently, were expected to increase material deprivations across different dimensions. The question was by how much? In this article we explain the modelling and methodological approach to project or nowcast the answer to that question. The method is dynamic as it was revised as additional information emerged during 2020 and 2021.
Göttingen: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Courant Research Centre - Poverty, Equity and Growth (CRC-PEG), 2021
A new inequality-sensitive multidimensional deprivation index (MDI) for dichotomous variables Dis... more A new inequality-sensitive multidimensional deprivation index (MDI) for dichotomous variables Discussion Papers, No. 283
In this paper, considering the overarching concern of the 2030 sustainable development agenda, le... more In this paper, considering the overarching concern of the 2030 sustainable development agenda, leaving no one behind, and the targets 1.2 and 10.1 of the SDGs, we point out that the mainstream approach to the multi-dimensional poverty measurement in developing countries is deficient to properly monitor progress in multi-dimensional poverty reduction mainly because it uses the household as the unit of analysis, ignoring thus intrahousehold inequalities, and is totally insensitive to inequality among the multi-dimensionally poor individuals, a serious defect of any poverty measure. Consequently, we propose to depart somewhat from the mainstream approach and to adopt a person-focused and inequalitysensitive framework, which is applied to the case of Nicaragua. Overall, we find that in this country, multi-dimensional poverty decreased by at least 17% between 2001 and 2014, but inequality among the multi-dimensionally poor individuals, an issue that is ignored by the mainstream approach,...
Analysis of Socio-Economic Conditions, 2021
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018
The Alkire and Foster (2011) methodology, as the mainstream approach to the measurement of multi-... more The Alkire and Foster (2011) methodology, as the mainstream approach to the measurement of multi-dimensional poverty in the developing world, is insensitive to inequality among the multidimensionally poor individuals and does not consider simultaneously the concepts of efficiency and distributive justice. Moreover, the vast majority of empirical indices of multi-dimensional poverty in the literature overlook intra-household inequalities, an issue that is crucial to a better understanding of gender inequalities, because they equate the poverty status of the household with the poverty status of all individuals in the household. Consequently, using the general framework proposed by Silber and Yalonetzky (2013) and Rippin's ideas on multi-dimensional poverty measurement (2013, 2017), we propose in this paper to depart somehow from the mainstream approach and take an individual-based and inequality sensitive view of multi-dimensional poverty when only ordinal (dichotomized) variables are available. We use such an approach to estimate multi-dimensional poverty among individuals aged 18 and 59 years living in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, shedding thus some light on gender differences in poverty and inequality in those countries. Overall, we find that individuals living in Guatemala have the highest probability of being multidimensionally poor, followed by the ones from Nicaragua; people living in Costa Rica, by contrast, have by far the lowest probability of being poor. In the middle appears Honduras and El Salvador, Hondurans having a larger probability of being multi-dimensionally poor than the Salvadorians. Regarding the gender gaps, the overall estimates suggest that the incidence and the intensity of multidimensional poverty in Central America are higher among females; inequality, however, is somewhat higher among males.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2017
Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch ge... more Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.
Revista de la CEPAL, 2017
This paper estimates multidimensional poverty in Nicaragua applying the methodology developed by ... more This paper estimates multidimensional poverty in Nicaragua applying the methodology developed by Alkire and Foster using the 2001, 2005 and 2009 Nicaragua Living Standards Measurement Survey data. Eleven dimensions are considered and three weighting systems are used: besides an equal weighting system, two systems derived from the data itself, which are novel to the case of Nicaragua. In general, this paper, in addition to questioning the official poverty estimates in Nicaragua and to presenting empirical evidence that support the adoption of a multidimensional methodology, provides figures more realistic of the magnitude of poverty in this country than the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), since the MPI captures acute poverty and, therefore, provides relatively low estimates for Nicaragua. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort to estimate multidimensional poverty in Nicaragua, for the whole population,...
Economics of Disasters and Climate Change
The impact of the global economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will not affect all chil... more The impact of the global economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will not affect all children equally: those in poorer households and children who are disadvantaged face the most serious consequences. As parents lose their jobs and incomes, the impact on children living in impoverished households must be measured. In this article, we assess the economic consequences of the pandemic on these children. Given that poorer families have a larger number of children than other families, the analysis first establishes the proportion of children living in monetary poor households, as defined by national standards, across developing countries. Then, using historical changes and trends of income distribution per country, the latest projections about economic decline due to the pandemic, and demographic information about the distribution of children by deciles, we estimate the expected increase in the number of children in monetary poor households in developing countries as of end of 2020 to be an additional 122-144 million and, at best, a moderate decline in these numbers by end of 2021.
Journal of Human Development and Capabilities
This paper proposes a new index of multidimensional poverty, called the Global Correlation Sensit... more This paper proposes a new index of multidimensional poverty, called the Global Correlation Sensitive Poverty Index (G-CSPI), which has three interesting features. First, it encompasses three dimensions: decent work, education and access to drinking water and sanitation, which largely overlap with the list of ideal dimensions obtained by expanding the Constitutional Approach, although it does not include direct health measures. Second, it uses a distribution-sensitive measure that can also be decomposed into the three poverty components: incidence, intensity and inequality. Finally, the G-CSPI is an individual-based, rather than household-based index, although restricted to individuals 15-65 years of age. It is thus able to detect intra-household differences in poverty among members within that age-range. To have a full picture of multidimensional poverty at the country level, it should then be complemented by specific poverty measures for children and the elderly. Being centred on individuals and sensitive to inequality, the G-CSPI is coherent with the overarching principle of the 2030 Agenda "leaving no one behind". Using recent estimates of the G-CSPI for 104 countries, the empirical analysis reveals that the index is highly robust to different specifications, and that, as expected, fragile countries experience the largest levels of poverty.
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Papers by José Espinoza-Delgado