Measuring Inequality of Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean PDF Download

Author: Ricardo Paes de Barros
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 0821377469
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Equality of opportunity is about leveling the playing field so that circumstances such as gender, ethnicity, place of birth, or family background do not influence a person s life chances. Success in life should depend on people s choices, effort and talents, not to their circumstances at birth. 'Measuring Inequality of Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean' introduces new methods for measuring inequality of opportunities and makes an assessment of its evolution in Latin America over a decade. An innovative Human Opportunity Index and other parametric and non-parametric techniques are presented for quantifying inequality based on circumstances exogenous to individual efforts. These methods are applied to gauge inequality of opportunities in access to basic services for children, learning achievement for youth, and income and consumption for adults.

Author: Matthew Hammill
Publisher: UN
ISBN: 9789211216592
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description
The study measures and analyses the household income growth performance of six countries in Central America between 1990 and 2004. Using national household surveys over the period, new empirical and methodological tools were employed to measure the growth in the incomes of the poor and provide an indication of some of pertinent factors in the trends occurred in the region. The results show that growth effects have been poverty reducing but redistribution effects have in many cases been poverty increasing. Further analyses showed that the inhibiting characteristics of the redistribution trends in Central America were due to a variety of structural inequalities in the social development of the countries of the region.

Author: Guillermo Cruces
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198801084
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 519

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Book Description
This book examines the links between economic growth, changing employment conditions, and the reduction of poverty in Latin America in the 2000s. Our analysis answers the following broad questions: Has economic growth resulted in gains in standards of living and reductions in poverty via improved labour market conditions in Latin America in the 2000s, and have these improvements halted or been reversed since the international crisis of 2008? How do the rate and character of economic growth, changes in the various employment and earnings indicators, and changes in poverty and inequality indicators relate to each other? Our contribution is an in-depth study of the multi-pronged growth-employment-poverty nexus based on a large number of labour market indicators (twelve employment and earnings indicators and four poverty and inequality indicators) for a large number of Latin American countries (sixteen of them). The book presents a positive and hopeful set of findings for the period 2000 to 2012/13. Economic growth took place and brought about improvements in almost all labour market indicators and consequent reductions in poverty rates. But not all improvements were equal in size or caused by the same things. Some macroeconomic factors were associated with changes in labour market conditions, some of them always in the welfare-improving direction and some others always in the welfare-reducing direction. Most countries in the region suffered a deterioration in at least some labour market indicators as a consequence of the international crisis of 2008, but the negative effects were reversed very quickly in most countries.

Author: Francis Fukuyama
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421405709
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
The rise of populism in new democracies, especially in Latin America, has brought renewed urgency to the question of how liberal democracy deals with issues of poverty and inequality. Citizens who feel that democracy failed to improve their economic condition are often vulnerable to the appeal of political leaders with authoritarian tendencies. To counteract this trend, liberal democracies must establish policies that will reduce socioeconomic disparities without violating liberal principles, interfering with economic growth, or ignoring the consensus of the people. Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy addresses the complicated philosophical and moral issues surrounding the distribution of economic goods in free societies as well as the empirical relationships between democratization and trends in poverty and inequality. This volume also discusses the variety of welfare-state policies that have been adopted in different regions of the world. The book’s distinguished group of contributors provides a succinct synthesis of the scholarship on this topic. They address such broad issues as whether democracy promotes inequality, the socioeconomic factors that drive democratic failure, and the basic choices that societies must make as they decide how to deal with inequality. Chapters focus on particular regions or countries, examining how problems of poverty and inequality have been handled (or mishandled) by newer democracies in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy will prove vital reading for all students of world politics, political economy, and democracy’s global prospects. Contributors: Dan Banik, Nancy Bermeo, Dorothee Bohle, Nathan Converse, Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Francis Fukuyama, Béla Greskovits, Stephan Haggard, Ethan B. Kapstein, Robert R. Kaufman, Taekyoon Kim, Huck-Ju Kwon, Jooha Lee, Peter Lewis, Beatriz Magaloni, Mitchell A. Orenstein, Marc F. Plattner, Charles Simkins, Alejandro Toledo, Ilcheong Yi

Author: Mr. Ravi Balakrishnan
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1484326091
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 123

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Book Description
Over the past decades, inequality has risen not just in advanced economies but also in many emerging market and developing economies, becoming one of the key global policy challenges. And throughout the 20th century, Latin America was associated with some of the world’s highest levels of inequality. Yet something interesting happened in the first decade and a half of the 21st century. Latin America was the only region in the World to have experienced significant declines in inequality in that period. Poverty also fell in Latin America, although this was replicated in other regions, and Latin America started from a relatively low base. Starting around 2014, however, and even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, poverty and inequality gains had already slowed in Latin America and, in some cases, gone into reverse. And the COVID-19 shock, which is still playing out, is likely to dramatically worsen short-term poverty and inequality dynamics. Against this background, this departmental paper investigates the link between commodity prices, and poverty and inequality developments in Latin America.

Author: Giovanni Andrea Cornia
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198701802
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
This volume documents and explains the reduction of income inequality that has taken place in the majority of Latin American countries over the last decade.

Author: Marianne Fay
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 9780821360699
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
About half of the region's poor live in cities, and policy makers across Latin America are increasingly interested in policy advice on how to design programmes and policies to tackle poverty. This publication argues that the causes of poverty, the nature of deprivation, and the policy levers to fight poverty are, to a large extent, site specific. It therefore focuses on strategies to assist the urban poor in making the most of the opportunities offered by cities, such as larger labour markets and better services, while helping them cope with the negative aspects, such as higher housing costs, pollution, risk of crime and less social capital.

Author:
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Caribbean Area
Languages : en
Pages : 41

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Book Description

Author: Francisco H. G. Ferreira
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 0821397230
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
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 remarkable process of social transformation. We propose an original definition of the middle class, tailor-made for Latin America, centered on the concept of economic security and thus a low probability of falling into poverty. Given our definition of the middle class, there are four, not three, classes in Latin America. Sandwiched between the poor and the middle class there lies a large group of people who appear to make ends meet well enough, but do not enjoy the economic security that would be required for membership of the middle class. We call this group the 'vulnerable'. In an almost mechanical sense, these transformations in Latin America reflect both economic growth and declining inequality in over the period. We adopt a measure of mobility that decomposes the 'gainers' and 'losers' in society by social class of each household. The continent has experienced a large amount of churning over the last 15 years, at least 43% of all Latin Americans changed social classes between the mid 1990s and the end of the 2000s. Despite the upward mobility trend, intergenerational mobility, a better proxy for inequality of opportunity, remains stagnant. Educational achievement and attainment remain to be strongly dependent upon parental education levels. Despite the recent growth in pro-poor programs, the middle class has benefited disproportionally from social security transfers and are increasingly opting out from government services. Central to the region's prospects of continued progress will be its ability to harness the new middle class into a new, more inclusive social contract, where the better-off pay their fair share of taxes, and demand improved public services.

Author: United Nations Publications
Publisher: UN
ISBN: 9789211220698
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This publication examines the social impact of an unprecedented crisis. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have spread to all areas of human life, altering the way we interact, crippling economies and bringing about profound changes in societies. The pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated the major structural gaps in the region, and it is clear that the costs of inequality have become unsustainable and that it is necessary to rebuild with equality and sustainability, aiming for the creation of a true welfare state, long overdue in the region.