Estimating Income Poverty and Inequality from the GallupWorld Poll: The case of Latin America and the Caribbean

This article takes advantage of a new source of information, the 2006 Gallup World Poll, to estimate and characterize income poverty and inequality in Latin Americaand the Caribbean (LAC) at the country level, and to compare LAC with other regionsin the world. The Gallup survey has the advantage of being conducted in over 130nations with almost the same questionnaire; it stands as a complement to nationalhousehold surveys for international comparison purposes. Our results confirm thatLatin American countries are among the most unequal in the world, but we also find,considered as a single unit, Latin America is less unequal than other regions.