This study explores the evolution of inequality in Latin America during the COVID-19 pandemic using primary data available from household and employment surveys collected in 2020. Inequality increased on average by 2 percent between 2019 and 2020, twice the average annual growth in the...

Between 2000 and 2013, Latin America has considerably reduced poverty (from 46.3% to 29.7% of the population). In this paper, we use synthetic panels to show that, despite progress, the region remains characterized by substantial vulnerability that also affects the rising middle-class. More...

The relationship between the abundance of natural resources and socio-economic performance has been a main object of study in the economic development field since Adam Smith. Dominated by the verification of the so called curse of natural resource, the mainstream literature on the topic has been...

This paper argues that the assumption of a homogeneous workforce, which is implicitly invoked in the decomposition analysis of changes in welfare indicators, hides the role that schooling and its returns may have on the understanding of these changes. Using Peruvian cross-sectional data for a...

We provide a method to estimate resource shares - the fraction of total household expenditure allocated to each household member - using OLS estimation of Engel curves. The method is a linear reframing of the nonlinear model of Dunbar, Lewbel and Pendakur (2013), extended to allow single-parent...

In this paper we aim to disentangle how sectoral economic growth affects the size of the middle class, using state-level data of Bolivia from 2000 to 2017 and breaking the three main economic activities into subsectors to attain more-specific results. Because the data from Bolivia are limited,...

The paper traces the evolution the concept of socioeconomic vulnerability to climate change has followed in the academic and scientific debate. The recent recognition of vulnerability as a social construction has shifted the focus of the analysis on the dimension of adaptive capacity, i.e. the...

GDP contractions are typically associated with within-country income inequality increases. While official income inequality data for 2020 will not be available for about two years, the already available employment data for 2020 shows that the difference between highly-educated and low-educated...

In this paper, the reimbursement of spending on medicin is considered as a problem of insurance, where the loss due to illness of the insured is covered totally or partially by an insurance company (which may be the government). The presence of moral hazard (in the form of the individual...