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....

During the twentieth century, internal migration and urbanization shaped Brazil's economic and social landscape. Cities grew tremendously, while immigration participated in the rapid urbanization process and the redistribution of poverty between rural and urban areas. In 1950, about a third of...

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...

This paper describes the construction of a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Bolivia for the year 1997. Three distinctive features render the SAM a useful starting point for distributional analyses. First, production in the agricultural and services sector is split up into formal and informal...

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...

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...

We study the labour market dynamics of men and women in El Salvador and Nicaragua, focusing on the factors that help men and women move into an advantageous labour market state from an unfavourable state. We consider 'advantageous' states to be formal salaried employees and self-employed workers...

In the great majority of Latin American countries in the 2000s, economic growth took place and brought about improvements in almost all labour market indicators and consequent reductions in poverty rates. Across countries, economic growth was not all that mattered; external factors were...

This report describes the socio-economic situation in Chile based on a large set of distributional, labor and social statistics computed from microdata of the Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica Nacional (CASEN) from 1990 to 2000. The report also draws from other data sources and the...