ABSTRACT
In early 1995, poverty in Mexico was a critical problem (and it still is). Almost a third of the population lived in extreme poverty – 4.8 million families, of which 2.8 million were rural. As these families are larger, four out of ten children were poor. In addition, indicators of health, education and nutrition were significantly different between the poor and the non-poor. However, even among the poor, there were large differences in the severity and depth of poverty as well as in their human capital; the marginalization of the rural poor exceeded that of the urban poor (a full description of poverty indicators can be found in Progresa (1997) and Levy and Rodriguez (2004)).
