We analyze the distributional effects of the reduction in energy subsidies in Argentina since 2016. As the policy reform also includes the introduction of a scheme to protect less well-off families (social tariff), we also review how well the targeting mechanism works. We apply traditional...

A vast proportion of households in developing countries like Paraguay are both consumers and producers of food, and thus the effects of food price fluctuations on welfare are not obvious. Historically, the agricultural sector in Paraguay has played a key role in economic development and has...

Conditional cash transfers have been adopted by a large number of countries in the past decade. Although the impacts of these programs have been studied extensively, understanding of the economic mechanisms through which cash and conditions affect household decisions remains incomplete. This...

The joint determination of aggregate economic growth and distributional change has been studied empirically from at least three different perspectives. A macroeconomic approach that relies on cross-country data on poverty, inequality, and growth rates has generated some interesting stylized...

This paper proposes two related measures of educational inequality: one for educational achievement and another for educational opportunity. The former is the simple variance (or standard deviation) of test scores. Its selection is informed by consideration of two measurement issues that have...

In response to a growing interest in comparing inequality levels and trends across countries, several cross-national inequality databases are now available. These databases differ considerably in purpose, coverage, data sources, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and quality of documentation. A...

The Gini coefficient of labor earnings in Brazil fell by nearly a fifth between 1995 and 2012, from 0.50 to 0.41. The decline in earnings inequality was even larger by other measures, with the 90-10 percentile ratio falling by almost 40 percent. Although the conventional explanation of a falling...

Building on earlier work by political philosophers, economists have recently sought to define a concept of equity that accommodates the fairness of reward to individual responsibility and effort, while allowing for the existence of some inequalities which are unfair and should be compensated....