The Changing Way Governments Talk about Poverty and Inequality : Evidence from Two Centuries of Latin American Presidential Speeches
This study uses text mining techniques on almost 900 presidential "state-of-the-union"--type speeches from 10 Latin American countries from 1819 to 2016. The paper documents a sharp increase in recent decades in references to poverty...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/163671516628297136/The-changing-way-governments-talk-about-poverty-and-inequality-evidence-from-two-centuries-of-Latin-American-presidential-speeches http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29221 |
| Summary: | This study uses text mining techniques
on almost 900 presidential
"state-of-the-union"--type speeches from 10 Latin
American countries from 1819 to 2016. The paper documents a
sharp increase in recent decades in references to poverty
and inequality. The study's long-term view shows that
the way in which poverty and inequality are discussed has
been changing. Using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation
algorithm, the paper shows that in recent years poverty has
been increasingly discussed as a broader multidimensional
challenge that requires a variety of social programs.
Inequality has been increasingly framed as an issue of equal
opportunities, whereas previously there was a greater focus
on social justice. The paper assesses whether the prevalence
of poverty and inequality in presidential speeches
correlates with measures such as social public spending, as
well as the poverty and inequality levels of the country. It
finds that during the 2000s, the countries that discussed
poverty and inequality at greater length were also the ones
that increased social spending and reduced poverty and
inequality the most. |
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