  The deceleration of global poverty reduction in the last decades suggests
that traditional redistribution policies are losing their effectiveness.
Alternative ways to work towards the #1 United Nations Sustainable Development
Goal (poverty eradication) are required. NGOs have insistingly denounced the
criminalization of poverty, and the social science literature suggests that
discrimination against the poor (a phenomenon known as aporophobia) could
constitute a brake to the fight against poverty. This paper describes a
proposal for an agent-based model to examine the impact that aporophobia at the
institutional level has on poverty levels. This aporophobia agent-based model
(AABM) will first be applied to a case study in the city of Barcelona. The
regulatory environment is central to the model, since aporophobia has been
identified in the legal framework. The AABM presented in this paper constitutes
a cornerstone to obtain empirical evidence, in a non-invasive way, on the
causal relationship between aporophobia and poverty levels. The simulations
that will be generated based on the AABM have the potential to inform a new
generation of poverty reduction policies, which act not only on the
redistribution of wealth but also on the discrimination of the poor.
