This paper examines how social exclusion contributes to violence in communities throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Residents in socially excluded communities cannot depend on those institutions designed to protect them, and violence becomes an instrument to achieve certain outcomes,...

Poverty reduction remains one of the main challenges for Latin America at the end of the 20th century. Most of the countries in the region are classified as middle income by international standards, and yet they register poverty rates well above what would be expected given their GDP per capita....

Raising labor productivity is recognized as a critical factor for increasing economic growth and reducing poverty levels in Latin America. Low levels of education continue to be singled out as the main obstacle to higher productivity in the region. We examine the scope for education to lift...

This paper tests the sensitivity of poverty indexes to the choice of adult equivalence scales, assumptions about the existence of economies of scale in consumption, methods for treating missing and zero incomes, and different adjustments to handle income misreporting. We also perform sensitivity...

This paper processes 76 household surveys from 17 Latin American countries to document changes in poverty and inequality during the 1990s. We show that there is no country in Latin America where inequality declined during the 1990s. Poverty declined in 10 or 11 of the 17 countries for which...

The objective of this work is to assess the changes in poverty and inequality that have taken place in Latin America and the Caribbean from 1970 to 1995, with special emphasis on the 1990s. The main distinctive characteristic of the study is that rather than focusing on individual country...