Poverty in Mexico from an Ethnic Perspective

In Mexico, analysis of indigenous welfare is usually done using municipalities or localities, not households, as the point of reference, and this almost never in a way that allows for direct comparison with the non-indigenous population. The 2008 edition of the National Household Survey of Income and Expenditure made possible, for the first time, the identification of the indigenous population. In this paper the official income poverty method is replicated for 2008, comparing the results for the indigenous and non-indigenous populations. Additionally, inequality measures are estimated, comparing the income distribution of ethnic subgroups and their respective contributions with total inequality. Measurements using income data for indigenous and non-indigenous populations show that members of the first group are poorer, and that poverty is stronger in the rural areas. Inequality measures show that there is, in general, less inequality in the indigenous population than in the non-indigenous population, although this ranking is reversed for the distribution of income amongst the poor. A decomposition of the Gini coefficient shows that the indigenous population contributes proportionately less to total inequality than does the non-indigenous population.