Documents Ortiz-Juarez, Eduardo 5 results

"In this paper we make estimates of the potential short-term economic impact of COVID-19 on global monetary poverty through contractions in per capita household income or consumption.
Our estimates are based on three scenarios: low, medium, and high global contractions of 5, 10, and 20 per cent; we calculate the impact of each of these scenarios on the poverty headcount using the international poverty lines of US$1.90, US$3.20 and US$5.50 per day.
Our estimates show that COVID poses a real challenge to the UN Sustainable Development Goal of ending poverty by 2030 because global poverty could increase for the first time since 1990 and, depending on the poverty line, such increase could represent a reversal of approximately a decade in the world's progress in reducing poverty.
In some regions the adverse impacts could result in poverty levels similar to those recorded 30 years ago. Under the most extreme scenario of a 20 per cent income or consumption contraction, the number of people living in poverty could increase by 420–580 million, relative to the latest official recorded figures for 2018."

"As the rate of new COVID-19 cases accelerates across the developing world, it exposes the potentially devastating costs of job losses and income reversals. Unconditional emergency cash transfers can mitigate the worst immediate effects of the COVID-19 crisis on poor and near-poor households that do not currently have access to social assistance or insurance protection. This paper provides estimates for a Temporary Basic Income (TBI), a minimum guaranteed income above the poverty line, for vulnerable people in 132 developing countries.

A TBI amounts to between 0.27 and 0.63 per cent of their combined GDPs, depending on the policy choice:

i. top-ups on existing average incomes in each country up to a vulnerability threshold;
ii. lump-sum transfers that are sensitive to cross-country differences in the median standard of living; or,
iii. lump-sum transfers that are uniform regardless of the country where people live.

A temporary basic income is within reach and can inform a larger conversation about how to build comprehensive social protection systems that make the poor and near-poor more resilient to economic downturns in the future."

"In this paper we argue that the decline in global inequality over the last decades has spurred a 'sunshine' narrative of falling global inequality that has been rather oversold, in the sense, we argue, it is likely to be temporary. We argue the decline in global inequality will reverse due to changes in the between-country component. We find there is a potentially startling global inequality 'boomerang', possibly in the mid-to-late 2020s, which would have happened even if there were no pandemic, and that the pandemic is likely to bring forward the global inequality boomerang."