Changes in unrelated variety and climbing the poverty ladder: a U-shaped relationship

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to study how changes in unrelated variety influence individuals’ poverty alleviation. Drawing on the LiTS III database, we employed the Oprobit model to test 5007 individual-level observations from 23 regions in four former Yugoslavian countries. All results imply that the changes in unrelated variety have a U-shaped relationship with individuals’ poverty alleviation. Our findings enrich the unrelated variety research by providing micro-level evidence and offer practical insights for governments, organizations and individuals aiming to reduce poverty.

KEYWORDS:

• Unrelated variety
• poverty alleviation (climbing poverty ladder)
• U-shape
• former Yugoslavia
• Oprobit model

JEL CODES:

• P36
• R11

Acknowledgements

We thank our anonymous reviewer for his/her helpful comments. We also thank Mrs. Cuiying Wang for providing us with data access.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We appreciate our anonymous reviewer for mentioning this thing.

2 In order to have to same logic as other regressions in this subsection, we mean-centering the poverty ladder in 2012.

3 The information is seen in the United Nations homepage: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/poverty/. Accessed in May, 2022.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is financed by the Humanity and Social Science Foundation of the Ministry of Education of China [Grant No: 22YJCZH117].