Micro and macro drivers of working poverty in four Latin-American countries: A comparative study

Working poverty is an increasingly relevant phenomenon in Latin America, yet research on the subject is scarce and mainly focused on national cases. This paper contributes to comparative studies on in-work poverty based on the cases of four countries in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. The aim of this article is to analyze the macro and micro drivers of working poverty through harmonized microdata from official household surveys. Using different definitions of working poverty and multivariate analysis, the study finds that economic development and labor and social policies are strongly related to different levels of in-work poverty, and that the micro-drivers of working poverty play a similar role in the four countries.