This paper discusses dimensions of inequality in sub-Saharan Africa and their causes. It starts with a review of the empirical evidence about inequality during the colonial period as well as the post-independence era. Then it discusses the forces that det

Labour market incomes have been a major contributor to the important fall in inequality in Latin America during the 2000s. Indeed, it was the main contributor in countries where inequality fell more dramatically. A proper understanding of the workings of the labour market is necessary to...

A natural way of viewing an inequality or a poverty measure is in terms of the vector distance between an actual (empirical) distribution of incomes and some appropriately normative distribution (reflecting a perfectly equal distribution of incomes, or a

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...

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...

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...

This study assesses the evolution of inequality in Uruguay during 1981-2010, considered as subperiods built on the basis of the main policy regimes observed: extreme right (1981-84), centre-right (1985-89), right (1990-2004), and centre-left (2005-10). Income inequality diminished during the...

Inequality in Mexico rose between 1989 and 1994 and declined between 1994 and 2010. We examine the role of market forces (demand and supply of labour by skill), institutional factors (minimum wages and unionization rate), and public policy (cash transfers) in explaining changes in inequality. We...

We examine the drivers of inequality change in Honduras between 1991-2007, trying to understand why inequality increased in Honduras until 2005, while it was falling in most other Latin American countries. Using annual household surveys, we document first rising inequality between 1991-2005,...

This paper reviews the pattern of poverty rates and income inequality in El Salvador since the 1990s. It discusses some of the likely factors that explain the reduction in income inequality that has taken place in the country in the last decade, which paradoxically has coincided with the long...