One of the central concerns in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has been the reduction of poverty and inequality so prevalent in the continent. Using large world samples, the literature has found that financial development increases economic growth, increases the income of the poor, and...

This paper documents patterns and recent developments on different dimensions of inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). New comparative international evidence confirms that LAC is a region of high inequality, although maybe not the highest in the world. Income inequality has fallen...

This paper takes advantage of a new source of information – the Gallup World Poll 2006 – to estimate and characterize income poverty and inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) at the country level, and to compare LAC estimates to those in other regions of the world. The Gallup...

This paper provides original empirical evidence on the evolution of education inequality for all Latin American countries over the decades of 1990 and 2000. The analysis covers a wide range of issues on differences in educational outcomes and opportunities across the population, including...

The paper tracks recent changes in the components of social protection in Latin America, the reforms to social insurance in the 1990s and the growth of social assistance in the 2000s, and assesses their effects on poverty and inequality and implications for welfare institutions in the region....

Economic inequality and poverty have persisted in Latin America despite important changes in political and policy regimes. This paper explores the relationship between various human capital programs aimed to reduced poverty and how improvements of those in poverty in the left tail of the earning...

This paper offers a medium-term perspective for analysing the trade openness - inequality relationship in Latin America. We present three contributions. The first is that we assemble a database on income distribution indicators systematically estimated from household surveys with emphasis on...

This paper provides original empirical evidence on the evolution of education inequality for the Latin American countries over the decades of 1990 and 2000. The analysis covers a wide range of issues on the differences in educational outcomes and opportunities across the population, including...

Declining social and economic inequalities since the late 1990s coincided with several basic shifts in Latin America's political landscape, including an electoral turn to the left and a revival of social mobilization from below. These shifts helped to 'repoliticize' inequality and return...

Countries with high income inequality also show a strong association between parents ́and childrenś economic well-being; i.e. low intergenerational mobility. This study is the first to test this relationship in a between and within country setup, using harmonized micro data from 18 Latin...