Essays on Fuzzy Multidimensional Poverty and Vulnerabilities: Analyzes of Socioeconomic Deprivations and Inequalities in Brazil

This thesis aims to shed light on the complexity and multidimensionality of poverty and vulnerabilities in Brazil. In the first chapter, Gianni Betti and I explore deprivations associated with the capacity to prevent and recover from infection with COVID-19. We wrote this article during the first wave of the pandemic outbreak to show that multidimensionally poor people are also the most vulnerable in emergencies and expose the need for coordinated national action prioritizing the most exposed groups in Brazil. Using the Alkire-Foster method and a fuzzy set approach, we propose two pandemic-specific indexes to measure vulnerability in terms of the capacity to prevent infection with and to recover from the disease. The outcomes reveal structural deprivations in the country and considerable inequality among regions and ethnic groups. In the period studied, rank correlations confirm that the most vulnerable states were also among those with the highest pandemic-related deaths per million people. The article was published in World Development. In the second chapter, the focus is on gender differences in multidimensional poverty in Brazil. The chapter contributes to the literature on multidimensional poverty measurement by applying and proposing procedures to improve individual-level estimations considering the limitations of household surveys. I create two individual-based indexes with indicators that are key aspects in gender and feminist analyses. Applying a fuzzy approach and the Alkire-Foster method, I estimate multidimensional poverty and gender differences in three perspectives: intrahousehold, interhousehold, and intracouple. I also calculate inequality among the poor and intracouple gender gaps proposing fuzzy versions for these analyses. The results suggest that women are disadvantaged in dimensions that are crucial components of agency or degree of empowerment. In most specifications, individuals living in female-headed households are poorer than those living in male-headed households, but in female-headed households, women are in advantage compared to men, or at least the disparity decreases. In the third chapter, I concentrate on labor market vulnerability in Brazil. Here, vulnerability refers to the capacity of achieving full potential in work and career, finding and seizing employment opportunities, and having a decent job. The chapter aims to propose two labor market vulnerability indexes (LMVI) that include people inside and outside the labor market. Using a fuzzy set approach and comparing two years, I estimate vulnerability from two perspectives: individual and household. One of the innovations of the household-based measure is to understand if people that are vulnerable or outside the labor force (e.g., dependents) can have support from members of their household that are working and are not vulnerable. The outcomes reveal that the average degree of vulnerability was high and had a slow change between the years. Although education levels improved, precarity and other labor deprivations did not make progress in the period.