Deconstructing the decline in inequality in Latin America
By Nora Lustig, L. López-Calva, Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez. 2013
141 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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 reduction in hourly labor income inequality, and more robust and progressive government transfers. Available evidence suggests that it is the skill premium -- or, more precisely, the returns to primary, secondary, and tertiary education vs. no schooling or incomplete primary schooling -- that drives the decline in hourly labor income inequality. The causes behind the decline in returns to schooling, however, have not been unambiguously established. Some studies find that returns fell because of an increase in the supply of workers with more educational attainment; others, because of a shift in demand away from skilled labor.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f1c8f0e7bff4b4c8a2ccdcc388127a3b7fca16a
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Citations in the corpus
- Intergenerational Mobility and Inequality: The Latin American Case* (2014, background): “This recent equalization process is far from closing the gap with the rest of the world, but it has reversed growing disparities, with a drop of the Gini from 0.55 in the late 1990s to ∼0.49 in the late 2000s (Lustig et al. 2013).”