Este artículo documenta el patrón de auge y caída de la desigualdad del ingreso en América Latina en el período 1980-2008 y presenta posibles determinantes de estas tendencias. Después de una revisión general de las tendencias regionales y comparaciones con otras regiones del mundo, el...

The effects of market and policy reforms on poverty and inequality in Latin America have been of considerable concern. The region continues to have relatively great income inequalities. Two different societies with the same income distribution may have different levels of social welfare because...

Empirical work suggests the presence of a public sector wage premium, the reasons for which are investigated in this paper. The results demonstrate a higher premium paid to women and premium decreases concurrent with skills. Job security undermines the incentive to work hard and forces the...

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 exploits a rich collection of household surveys to investigate the wage differential between the public and private sectors in 17 Latin American countries during the 1980s and 1990s. The paper also studies how the sector of employment affects the gender wage gap. The paper finds very...

This paper develops and applies a new approach to the estimation of the impact of economy-wide reforms on wage differentials, using a new high-quality data set on wage differentials by schooling level for 18 Latin American countries for the period 1980-1998. The results indicate that reform...

The future of structural reforms in Latin America is under discussion. The purpose of this document is to synthesize the facts and opinions that underlie this debate. The first section shows that although the reform process has not ground to a halt, it has been incomplete and uneven, both across...

Este trabajo intenta responder a la pregunta de cuál ha sido el efecto de la liberalización comercial y financiera sobre la desigualdad y la pobreza en América Latina. Para esto, proponemos una metodología para estimar el efecto de la liberalización económica sobre la desigualdad y la...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the role of state-owned banks and also presents some new results and a robustness analysis. The paper shows that state-owned banks located in developing countries have fiscal costs because they are characterized by lower returns than...

According to recent research, external factors and political governance considerations are key determinants of capital flows in Latin America. We postulate that corporate governance is a crucial determinant as well. We show that while the region is characterized by relatively low levels of...