Informe sobre la pobreza en la Republica Dominicana : logrando un crecimiento economico que beneficie a los pobres
Carraro, Carlo | Marchiori, Carmen | Sgobbi, Alessandra
The Dominican Republic experienced strong economic growth with improvements in the quality of life in the 1990s. Poverty declined from the early 1990s to 1998, albeit modestly, and there was important progress in social indicators that put the country on track to some of the Millennium Development Goals. Since then the country continued to experience impressive economic growth that started to decelerate in 2000 and ended up in a major financial and economic crisis. This report finds that poverty and the incomes of the poor saw virtually no improvements during the growth bonanza of 1997-2002 and that the 2003-2004 economic crisis brought a dramatic deterioration of real incomes and poverty levels. About 16 percent of the Dominican population (1.5 million) became poor and about 7 percent (670 thousand) fell in extreme poverty (incomes too low to afford the food basket of minimum caloric intake) in the last two years. In 2004, 42 out of each 100 Dominicans were poor, and 16 of them were living in extreme poverty. Income inequality remained unchanged over the last 7 years at a Gini coefficient of 0.52, the average for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the most unequal region in the world. The report finds five principal sets of factors behind the limited poverty reduction in the late 1990s and persistent inequality, and derives a set of policy options in three core directions: (i) promoting growth opportunities for the poor; (ii) strengthening social services delivery and strategic investments in the poor; and, (iii) improving fiscal equity and revamping social protection to protect the poor and vulnerable groups against risks.
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