Productividad, capital humano y pobreza regional en Ecuador

Abstract

Abstract: One of the most important objectives of public policy is the reduction of poverty. This motivates the question: what are the factors that generate poverty reduction? The objective of this research is to examine the relationship between human capital and labor productivity at the regional poverty in Ecuador by spatial econometric techniques. We estimate two sets of regressions, in the first one, the dependent variable is the rate of poverty and the independent variable is the human capital. In the second model, the poverty rate is a function of labor productivity. In both models we include a set of socioeconomic variables control to ensure that the estimators are consistent. Our results show that human capital and labor productivity are policy instruments that reduce regional poverty. The existence of spatial dependence implies that you can not reduce poverty in a canton without reducing poverty in neighboring cantons.