This paper joins in the debate on the size of the middle class in Latin America, providing an analysis of its structure and characteristics. Using several measurements, it finds that 40-60 percent of Latin American households are middle class, a share which has consolidated over the past decade....

This paper sets out basic information on the middle class in eight Latin American countries over the last two decades. The middle class is identified as people living in households with income per capita between $10 and $50 per day, adjusted for purchasing power parity. This income-based...

This paper provides an analysis of the social consequences of people seeking to keep up with the Joneses. All individuals attempt to reach a higher rank than the Joneses, including the Joneses themselves. This attitude gives rise to an equilibrium in which all individuals have equal utilities...

This chapter explores the relationship between poverty and aging, in terms of its measurement and trends, as well as its alleviation, with particular attention to the most vulnerable individuals at each end of the age distribution. The measurement addresses both the definition of poverty and its...

This paper reviews some of the central issues that arise in thinking about the motives for, politics of, constraints on and measurement of, redistribution. Amongst the themes are: the potential usefulness of apparently inefficient policy instruments in overcoming the self-selection constraints...

Different concepts of inequality lead to different positions in discussions about whether economic growth leads to increasing inequality. This study investigates how over 1,100 young adults in Mozambique perceive inequality and whether their perceptions are based on relative or absolute terms....

Rising income inequality is an anglo Saxon problem. For most of the other OECD countries, earnings dispersion is rather persistent. Vertical mobility is to be taken into account. The paper also looks at the relationship of income inequality, growth and employment. It elaborates the point that...

Este trabajo presenta y discute un conjunto de estadísticas que caracterizan el nivel y la evolución de la polarización laboral en Argentina entre los años 1992 y 2006. Los resultados obtenidos sugieren que el nivel de polarización ha atravesado una primera etapa de crecimiento para luego...

We expand upon the previous models of inequity aversion of Fehr and Schmidt [1], and Frohlich et al. [2], which assume that dictators get disutility if the final allocation of surplus deviates from the equal split (egalitarian principle) or from the subjects' production (libertarian principle)....

Empirical analyses of economic inequality, poverty, and mobility in Germany are, to an increas-ing extent, using microdata from the German Federal Statistical Office's contribution to the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) as well as data from the German...