The explanation of economic inequality and its relationship to growth has produced a great amount of research. Kuznets (1955) formulated the quot;inverted-Uquot; hypothesis according to which inequality increases in the initial levels of development to decrease later on, after a certain point of...

In many developing countries, there does not exist a time series of nationally repre- sentative household budget or income surveys, while there often are urban household surveys as well as nationally representative Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) which lack information on incomes. This...

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...

Growth that reduces poverty is often considered pro-poor regardless of whether the poor benefit from it more than the non-poor. Such growth could simply be termed poverty-reducing growth. This paper argues that for growth to be pro-poor it should disproportionally benefit the poor. The paper...

Does predicted global warming imply more hunger in the future of Latin America? Climate projections prepared by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are briefly presented, along with an analysis of existing estimates of their probable impact on agriculture and food...

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...

This work assesses the changes in aggregate poverty and inequality that have taken place in Latin America during the past 26 years. With this objective, we put together the largest number of observations on income distribution for the region for the period from 1970-1995. We find that poverty...

In this paper we evaluate how well-targeted and effective in reducing poverty the Bolsa Família Program (PBF) was in Brazil between 2004 and 2019. In order to do this, we use data from the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) from 2004 to 2015, from the Continuous National Household Sample...

We provide an update on the impact the COVID-19 pandemic on the demand for cash and the use of methods of payment based on data from the Bank Note Distribution System and from consumer surveys conducted in April and August 2021. Our key findings are as follows: Cash in circulation remained high...

We use consumer surveys conducted in April, July and November 2020 to study how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the demand for cash and the use of various methods of payment. Continuing from Chen et al. (2020, 2021), we use data from the Bank Note Distribution System (BNDS) to track how the...