The effects of socio-demographic factors on the risk of becoming poor in Argentina. A longitudinal analysis of data from the Encuesta Permanente de Hogares (1995-2003)

María Constanza Street, Universidad de Buenos Aires
María Marta Santillán, Universidad Católica de Córdoba
Jerónimo R. Carballo, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

The authors examine the importance of socio-demographic factors in the process that lead Argentinean households to fall below the poverty line between 1995 and 2003, a period in which the economic conditions of Argentina changed drastically. They estimate the effects of socio-demographic and economic variables on the risk that households become poor; test whether or not the effects of these variables increased over the period; identify the groups most vulnerable to fall into poverty; and check whether new groups became vulnerable over the period. They use panel data from the “Encuesta Permanente de Hogares”, a household survey of the main urban areas of the country conducted by the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos, the Argentinean federal statistics agency. Using Poisson regression, effects of the socio-demographic variables are estimated for the whole period and estimated separately for each of three subperiod to assess changes in these effects over time.