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...

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....

Previous empirical research has shown that Mexico's Oportunidades program has succeeded in increasing schooling and improving health of disadvantaged children. This paper studies the program's potential longer-term consequences for the poverty and inequality of these children. It adapts methods...

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...

This paper examines the macroeconomic policies and outcomes experienced by the Latin American economies during the period 1990-2010. Macroeconomic policies refer to exchange rates, monetary and aggregate fiscal policies, while macroeconomic outcomes, on the other hand, refer to the patterns 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...

This paper examines the distributional effects of fiscal policy in Grenada. Using data from the 2017–2018 Living Conditions and Household Budgets Survey and following the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) analysis framework, we estimate the effects of fiscal policy interventions on inequality and...

The 'paradox of progress' is an empirical regularity that associates more education with larger income inequality. Two driving and competing factors behind this phenomenon are the convexity of the 'Mincer equation' (that links wages and education) and the heterogeneity in its returns, as...

Vast literature is available covering main Informal Economy (IE) causes and consequences for Latin America and Caribbean (LAC), but its size estimation has been mainly limited to worldwide models applied to the region. This paper proposes a MIMIC Base Model using a data set composed by 41...

Income inequality in Mexico increased between 1989 and 1994; between 1994 and 2006, inequality declined; and, between 2006 and 2014, inequality was again on the rise. We apply decomposition techniques to analyse the proximate determinants of labour income inequality and fiscal incidence analysis to...