Drawing on a comprehensive compilation of quantile shares and inequality measures for 34 countries, including over 5,600 estimated Gini coefficients, we review the measurement of income inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean over the last seven decades. Although the evidence from the...

This paper shows the power of applying Shannon’s (1948) information theory perspective to inequality measurement by considering the thought experiment of drawing a dollar at random from an income distribution and asking who the dollar came from. The surprise at being told who the dollar came...