Income differences arise from many sources. While some kinds of inequality, caused by effort differences, might be associated with faster economic growth, other kinds, arising from unequal opportunities for investment, might be detrimental to economic progress. This study uses two new metadata...

After decades of stagnation, the size of Latin America's middle class recently expanded to the point where, for the first time ever, the number of people in poverty is equal to the size of the middle class. This volume investigates the nature, determinants and possible consequences of this...

More than a decade of energy and transport subsidies have weakened Argentina’s fiscal capacity. Following the 2001 crisis, public services tariffs were frozen in an attempt to offset the negative effects on households’ real purchasing power. However, these subsidies steadily increased over...

Income differences arise from many sources. While some kinds of inequality, caused by effort differences, might be associated with faster economic growth, other kinds, arising from unequal opportunities for investment, might be detrimental to economic progress. This study uses two new metadata...

The 2001/02 Argentine crisis had a profound impact on Uruguay's economy. Uruguay's gross domestic product shrank by 17.5 percent and the proportion of people living below the poverty line doubled in just two years. It took almost 10 years for the poverty rate to recover to its pre-crisis level....

While the distributional impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have been well-documented in high-income countries, studies in low- and middle-income countries have been relatively rare due to data limitations. This paper uses pre-pandemic household welfare data and high-frequency household phone...

The 2001/02 Argentine crisis had a profound impact on Uruguay's economy. Uruguay's gross domestic product shrank by 17.5 percent and the proportion of people living below the poverty line doubled in just two years. It took almost 10 years for the poverty rate to recover to its pre-crisis level....

Widespread agreement that poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing deprivations along multiple dimensions, clashes with often vociferous disagreement about how best to measure these deprivations. Drawing on the recent literature, this short note proposes three methodological...

Socioeconomic segregation is often decried for denying poorer children the benefits of positive' peer effects'. Yet standard, linear-in-means models of peer effects (a) implicitly assume that segregation is zero sum, with gains and losses to rich and poor perfectly offsetting, and (b) rule out...

Income differences arise from many sources. While some kinds of inequality, caused by effort differences, might be associated with faster economic growth, other kinds, arising from unequal opportunities for investment, might be detrimental to economic progress. We construct two new metadata...