This paper studies the empirical links among factor endowments, trade, and personal income distribution. The motivation is that many developing countries have implemented radical trade reforms in recent years. These reforms have changed relative prices, induced a reallocation of resources, and...

The objective of this work is to assess the changes in poverty and inequality that have taken place in Latin America and the Caribbean from 1970 to 1995, with special emphasis on the 1990s. The main distinctive characteristic of the study is that rather than focusing on individual country...

Following the 1994 financial crisis, the rate of saving of the Mexican economy fell from 21. 7 percent to 19. 8 percent of GDP. The decline was associated with a reduction in the rate of external saving from 6. 9 to 0. 5 percent between 1994 and 1995. The overall reduction was not more dramatic...

El desarrollo de América Latina en las últimas décadas no ha sido equitativo. La región ha tenido el grado de desigualdad mas alto del mundo. Ello permea la opinión pública, los circulos intelectuales y la orientación de las políticas públicas. Este breve documento de discusión evalúa...

This paper shows that the factors affecting labor supply have been key determinants of the changes in employment, unemployment, and income differentials in Latin America in the 1990s. The two main forces driving labor supply in the region have been demographics and education.

In this paper, social mobility is measured by looking at the extent to which family background determines socioeconomic success. An index of social mobility for developing countries is proposed based on the correlation of schooling gaps between siblings.

This paper processes 76 household surveys from 17 Latin American countries to document changes in poverty and inequality during the 1990s. We show that there is no country in Latin America where inequality declined during the 1990s. Poverty declined in 10 or 11 of the 17 countries for which...

This paper presents microeconomic simulation techniques to examine what drives differences in inequality across countries. The simulation decomposes cross-country inequality differences into the importance of individual decisions, such as fertility, mating, labor force participation, and...

This paper tests the sensitivity of poverty indexes to the choice of adult equivalence scales, assumptions about the existence of economies of scale in consumption, methods for treating missing and zero incomes, and different adjustments to handle income misreporting. We also perform sensitivity...

This paper develops and applies a new approach to the estimation of the impact of economy-wide reforms on wage differentials, using a new high-quality data set on wage differentials by schooling level for 18 Latin American countries for the period 1980-1998. The results indicate that reform...