This paper focuses on the role of institutions in the fight against poverty and inequality. Our view of institutions encompasses formal rules designed by polity (including those in the legal and economics sphere such as rules of property rights, contracts and liabilities) as well as informal...

This paper focuses on the role of "institutions" in the fight against poverty and inequality. Our view of institutions encompasses formal rules designed by polity (including those in the legal and economics sphere such as rules of property rights, contracts and liabilities) as well as informal...

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...

Diverse goals which are widely agreed to be important in world society. Nevertheless, discussions on trade policy often refer only to economic objectives, usually still more narrowly conceived in terms of gains in aggregate income through trade. Where other objectives are not simply ignored, it...

This paper describes the results of initial work analysing a panel of rural households in Peru between 1994 and 2004 to determine household responses to changes in relative prices of traditional versus export-oriented products. Our principal interest was to better understand how household...

Growing trade with China and India offer an array of new export opportunities for Latin America, yet it also poses new challenges. Heightened demand for raw materials accentuates the need for industrial diversification, while the new competition environment raises the stakes for investment in...

China's economy has expanded by leaps and bounds, with dazzling progress since it first opened to foreign investment and reform in 1978. Over the last 25 years and after a long period of economic autarky, the country has emerged as a major player in world trade. Its accession to the World Trade...

This paper presents a comparative overview of mobility patterns in 14 Latin American countries between 1992 and 2003. Using three alternative econometric techniques on constructed pseudo-panels, the paper provides a set of estimators for the traditional notion of income mobility as well as for...

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...

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...