The paper reviews the steady and widespread decline in income inequality which has taken place in most of Latin America over 2002-10 and which - if continued for another 2-3 years - would reduce the average regional income inequality to pre-liberalization levels. The paper then focuses on the...

Between 2000 and 2010, the Gini coefficient declined in 13 of 17 Latin American countries. The decline was statistically significant and robust to changes in the time interval, inequality measures, and data sources. In-depth country studies for Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico suggest two main...

Inequality in Latin America unambiguously declined in the 2000s. The Gini coefficient fell in 16 of the 17 countries where there are comparable data, and the change was statistically significant for all of them. Existing studies point to two main explanations for the decline in inequality: a...

Latin American countries are generally characterized as displaying high income and earnings inequality overall along with high inequality by gender, race, and ethnicity. However, the latter phenomenon is not a major contributor to the former phenomenon. Using household survey data from four...

This paper revisits the earlier assessments of the Palma Proposition and the ‘Palma Ratio’. The former is a proposition that currently changes in income or consumption inequality are (almost) exclusively due to changes in the share of the richest 10 per cent and poorest 40 per cent because...