Improving the understanding of individual and household characteristics in the analysis of poverty in Bolivia

Abstract

This thesis aims to determine to what extent differences in individual and household characteristics within the same country affect the poverty of different areas of Bolivia or different social groups. The analysis is divided into two blocks; unidimensional poverty analysis where we focus on income and multidimensional poverty analysis focusing on other household characteristics. We find that when the head of the households are women, educated, living in an urban area, not belonging to the indigenous ethnicity, living in the department of Santa Cruz, single, employed and in a unipersonal household are less likely to be unidimensional poor. And for the multidimensional headcount ratio (H) we get that more than half of the population is multidimensional poor (having more than 25% of deprivations). Also, on average the multidimensional poor are deprived in almost 40% of deprivations (A).