Social Factors Associated with Poverty in Households in Peru

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In general, I'm supportive of the general objective and methodology of this paper but it needs a great deal of theoretical development and methodological refinement before it's ready for publication.  

The centerpiece of this paper is a logit regression model which is "aimed at identifying the factors that determine monetary poverty in Peru, period 2020" using ENAHO data from INEI, the Peruvian national statistical agency.  This is a great source of data and the method chosen is a legitimate one.  

However, the question that the paper is attempting to tackle--the causes of poverty--is addressed by a large, rich theoretical literature which the paper does not engage with in any significant way.  Acemoglu, Robinson, Sachs, Easterly, North, Inglehart, Prebisch, Cardoso, as far back as Lenin, Marx and Weber all engage with the question of why some people and some places are poor and others are rich--the authors don't really engage with these broad and important questions in a meaningful way. Instead, the authors look specifically at papers examining correlates of poverty in Peru.   There's nothing wrong with examining the local context but without engaging with any kind of theoretical model of poverty and thinking about which correlated variables are causes and which are effects the statistical model that they assemble isn't likely to have any meaning...

 

For example, the authors use the INEI ENAHO variable for "poverty" as their dependent variable--this is a dichotomous variable that takes on the value of 1 if the individual respondent is "poor," defined by INEI as consuming fewer than 360 soles monthly (a little less than $100 US).  Independent variables include, among other things, income, home ownership, access to social welfare programs and services like sewage, water and electricity.  


The problem here is that several of these independent or input variables are partly (or mostly) effects rather than causes of poverty, while others are not conceptually distinct from poverty. 

 

For example, income--here treated as an independent variable--though different from the consumption-based proxy measure of poverty used by INEI is not substantially different from the concept of "poverty" (indeed, income is often used elsewhere as a proxy measure for poverty itself).  Therefore, a proxy for poverty is on both sides of the (logit) regression equation.  By including income on the right side of the equation in the logit model, the authors are effectively controlling for the effect of income (poverty) on the relationship between their other independent variables and consumption (poverty), so it's not clear what these results are telling us.

Another example is home ownership--this is treated as an independent variable in the logit model, therefore implicitly treated as a cause of poverty.  But presumably someone's ability to purchase property and own a home is a consequence of poverty, not just a cause? 

A third example, access to food aid and non-food aid social programs; presumably these programs are targeted at poor households, families, or communities and therefore access to these programs is in part a result of poverty, not a cause of it.  

A related issue is that income is highly correlated with several of these other independent variables (see table 3), so my suspicion is that there are issues with collinearity here that the authors need to address in some way.

I would suggest that the authors think deeply about the literature in Political Economy and Development Economics around the causes of poverty.  Based on that literature, they should develop a conceptual model of causes of poverty (and potentially multiple contending models--scholars like Sachs, Prebisch and Acemoglu have very different ideas of why people are poor).  They should then build a new statistical model based on those models.  

 

No doubt poverty is a complicated thing there's a good chance that any serious investigation of the causes of poverty will need to grapple with the complicated causal dynamics of issues like home ownership and social programs (which might be both cause and effect) and this probably calls for somewhat more sophisticated methods--I'm not sure how much progress on this question we can make with a relatively simple multivariate logit model (or other cross-sectional generalized linear models), without engaging with time-series data or other more sophisticated techniques to parse cause from effect.  

 

I hope this isn't too discouraging--this is a valuable project but I'm afraid it will take much deeper theoretical engagement and probably much more sophisticated analytical processes to make significant traction.

Author Response

The observations and recommendations have been considered throughout the document.

We thank you for your collaboration in the scientific article.

Thanks.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper has an interesting approach on social factors associated with poverty in households in Peru. The paper is rich in information and the methods and data are pretty well presented. However, there are several issues which have to be revised.

In the title of the paper it would be better to remove the year 2000.

In the abstract, instead of 'the the period 2020' it should be better 'in 2000'. Also, the abstract has too many data included. It has to be revised in order to broadly show the results.

The introduction must start with what the paper is about and what this paper brings new or what is its added value in current international housing and poverty literature. Also, paper's literature review has to be a little bit expanded with examples or case studies from Europe, Africa and Asia, because at the moment Latin American references are dominant. For instance, for case studies on poverty in Africa it is the book of Beegle et al, 2016 on poverty issues, while for European contexts, see the largely debated case of the poverty and housing of the Roma people (e.g. the book of Ringold, Orenstein and Wilkens, 2005, see also Mereine Berki & Gyorgy Malovics on the poverty aspects, housing, social mixing and desegregation in a Hungarian case, published in journal Cities, 2021, and in Geographica Pannonica, 2020 etc). Several cases of the housing-poverty nexus in Asian and North American contexts could be mentioned too.

It can be also mentioned that it usually happens that the poverty trap can bring stigma and otherness against the poor people and the places they live (see a study of Keene and Padilla, 2010, in journal Health & Place, see also aspects of otherness against poor people and housing in an east central European borderland in a study of Covaci and Jucu in journal Identities, 2021).  

Several examples as those presented above could be used also in the discussion section in order to be linked further to the results of this paper. At the end of the discussions it would be good to be addressed some policy recommendations.

At the end of the method section it should be presented some limitations of the method and data used in this paper.

Among the major weaknesses of this paper are the conclusions and the quite short reference list. Conclusions should say more about the broader outcomes of this paper and the international implications/the novelty of the results as well as how other authors can further develop some new research angles based on the outcomes of this paper. The reference list is made up of mainly Latin American sources and has only 32 references. It would be good as I said above to expand it (to about 50 references) by adding new sources from different worldwide studies on poverty and housing.

Author Response

All the recommendations reached were included in the final file of the scientific article and are attached hereto for review.

We thank you for your collaboration in the scientific article.

Thanks.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors have improved their paper, but a minor revision is further required because the conclusions are too short and do not present the international implications of this study or how the results of the paper complements existing studies on poverty in households. Also, there are too many statistical data in conclusions - it would be good to appear only ideas related to the results of this study. 

Finally, authors have to attentively cross-check all references from the reference list to appear cited in the paper (and what is cited in the paper to appear in the reference list) and to attentively follow the journal reference style (doi numbers at the end of all cited articles, ISBN at the end of cited books).

Author Response

The recommendations reached regarding the discussions, conclusions and bibliographical references were considered in the scientific article, which is attached hereto for further details.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx