Decomposing the Recent Inequality Decline in Latin America

Azevedo, Joao Pedro ; Inchauste, Gabriela ; Sanfelice, Viviane

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ACCOUNTING;    ADJUSTMENT PERIOD;    ANNUALIZED CHANGE;    CASH TRANSFER PROGRAMS;    COL;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-6715
RP-ID  :  WPS6715

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Over the past decade, 12 of 14 LatinAmerican countries have experienced a reduction ininequality. Based on a series of counterfactual simulations,the observed changes in inequality are decomposed in orderto identify the main determinants of inequality. In contrastto methods that focus on aggregate summary statistics, themethod adopted in this paper generates counterfactualdistributions, so that the analysis can account for changesrelated to demographics, occupation, labor earnings andtransfers, pensions, and other nonlabor income sources. Theresults show that for the majority of countries in thesample, the most important contributor to the observeddecline in inequality has been the relatively strong growthin labor earnings at the bottom of the income distribution.In particular, most of the reduction in inequality can beattributed to an increase in earnings per hour for thebottom of the income distribution. The paper alsocontributes to the literature on inequality in Latin Americaby providing the Shapley-Shorrocks value of this decomposition.