Poverty and Inequality Report

"Poverty and Inequality Report"

This report covers Colombia for the period 2014-2017, including 11 capital cities located within major metropolitan areas and cities evaluated by the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE), and 11 municipalities that are part of the metropolitan areas of Barranquilla, Bucaramanga, Cali, and Medellín, but are not included in disaggregated data in DANE's official figures. The report is part of the most recent work by the Red de Ciudades Cómo Vamos (RCCV) network related to monitoring and tracking the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Colombian cities, and corresponds to the first of five urban challenges identified as a basis for sustainable development and the achievement of SDG 2.

The document is divided into two sections: The first, corresponding to poverty, reviews household income indicators, both in nominal terms and in relation to the poverty lines established for the cities under study, as well as the rates of moderate and extreme monetary poverty, approximating the intensity of monetary poverty. Subsequently, using information from the Citizen Perception Surveys of the Colombian Network of Cities How We Are Doing (Red Colombiana de Ciudades Cómo Vamos), the report examines self-perceptions of poverty in the cities under study. Additionally, it analyzes multidimensional poverty in the cities under study, based on data from the System for Identifying Potential Beneficiaries of Social Policies (Sisbén), which allows for the construction of approximate measures of multidimensional poverty. Finally, it analyzes municipal public investment in vulnerable populations and the fight against extreme poverty.

The second section, on inequality, first reviews the evolution of the Gini coefficient for income inequality analysis. Then, as a complement to traditional measures of inequality and poverty, which classify the population as poor or non-poor, the results of calculating the proportion of the population belonging to each of the four social classes—poor, vulnerable, middle, and upper—proposed by the World Bank methodology (2013) are presented. This analysis aims to determine whether people in the cities under study have experienced economic mobility.