世界银行-拉丁美洲和加勒比地区的性别与贫困：生命周期分析

Policy Research Working Paper Gender and Poverty in Latin Americaand the Caribbean An Analysis through the Life Cycle Paola Buitrago-HernandezDaniela Maquera SardonHugo ÑopoEliana Rubiano-Matulevich Policy Research Working Paper11260 Abstract This paper analyzes gender disparities in poverty across thelife cycle in Latin America and the Caribbean using harmo-nized household survey data. Although gender gaps in labormarket outcomes are well-documented, gendered povertydisparities have remained understudied. The results reveal agendered poverty penalty that emerges as women enter theirprime productive and reproductive years—a penalty that or no earners face particularly high vulnerability. To explorethe determinants of the gendered poverty penalty, the paperidentifies four relevant groups of individuals and appliesa Kitagawa-Binder-Oaxaca decomposition. The resultsindicate that, beyond the presence of children at homeand women’s age, unobserved factors (including potential The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about developmentissues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry thenames of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those Gender and Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Analysis through the Life Cycle Paola Buitrago-Hernandez, Daniela Maquera Sardon, Hugo Ñopo, Eliana Rubiano-Matulevich JEL Codes: I3, J1, O1 Keywords: Poverty, Gender, Lifecycle, Women, Household. Introduction and Literature An accurate measurement of poverty is important to identify the most in need, to formulate interventionsthat aim to alleviate poverty, and to monitor and assess their effectiveness. Conventional povertymeasurement relies on household-level income or consumption data as the key monetary measure ofwelfare. This approach attributes the same welfare estimate to all household members, maskingindividual gender disparities in poverty, as small differences are observed in aggregate poverty rates forwomen and men. This outcome is mainly explained by data limitations: poverty is measured at the There are important efforts underway to estimate the fraction of household expenditure consumedby/allocated to each family member, shedding light on intrahousehold resource allocation and thereforeintrahousehold monetary poverty (World Bank 2018; Muñoz-Boudet et al. 2018; Aminjonov et al. 2024;Aminjonov et al. 2025). In Latin America, Iglesias and Coelho (2020) estimate a model for householdbehavior using data from the Brazilian consumer expenditure survey, to show that the average share ofhousehold total expenditure is slightly larger for men than for women. For Mexico, Calvi et al. (2023)report that women receive a larger resource share and that households benefit from significanteconomies of scale. In Argentina, Bargain (2024) factors women's and men's net-of-tax earnings and Despite these difficulties, using existing household-level data is an imperfect but valuable way tounderstand the gender dimensions of poverty. One such approach is to adopt a life cycle approach topoverty measurement, which examines various age groups during their transitions into adulthood,marriage, parenthood, and employment, and analyzes gender disparities in the experience of poverty. Asecond approach that is increasingly used in the literature to understand the distinct experiences of This study employs both approaches to document the gendered poverty penalty in Latin America and theCaribbean (LAC) and examines the channels linking individuals and households to poverty. These factorscan reveal nuanced insights into how women, men, girls, and boys in the region experience povertydifferently, and how these differences become larger for certain households and in specific moments in life. Importantly, considering the intra-household ‘equal share’ limitation, this study emphasizes the roleofinter-household differencesin explaining a gender poverty gap in the LAC region. Findings from this We use a harmonized nationally representative cross-country dataset that covers around 86% of the LACpopulation, making coverage one other advantage of this study. Results point to the existence of agendered ‘poverty penalty’ against women in their prime productive and family formation years (25 to 49 years old). This gender disparity in the incidence of poverty can be as high as 7 percentage points forindividuals aged 25 to 35. Worryingly, the gap has been increasing over the last 15 years. In line withprevious work (Beegle et al. 2021, at the global level), our results also show that in LAC, adults, who co-reside with children, younger children in particular, are more likely to live in poverty. Depending onwhether they cohabit with children, the gendered poverty gap emerges and b