Two countries can have the same poverty levels, but in one, it might take a family four times longer to actually get out of it.
March 20, 2026
Original Paper
Poverty traps are rare, but trappedness isn't
arXiv · 2603.18716
The Takeaway
Economists typically measure who is poor today, but this paper argues 'trappedness' is more important. Even if two countries look equally poor, the actual architecture of their welfare and health systems can mean an escape that takes two years in one country takes eight years in another.
From the abstract
The persistence of poverty is not well explained by who is poor. We argue the relevant object of measurement is trappedness--expected escape time from deprivation--which varies systematically across institutional environments and is invisible to standard poverty indices. Using Markov chains estimated on twenty years of longitudinal data from 27 European countries, we show that countries with identical deprivation rates differ in escape times by up to fourfold. These differences are not explained