Between 2000 and 2013, Latin America has considerably reduced poverty (from 46.3% to 29.7% of the population). In this paper, we use synthetic panels to show that, despite progress, the region remains characterized by substantial vulnerability that also affects the rising middle-class. More...

The relationship between the abundance of natural resources and socio-economic performance has been a main object of study in the economic development field since Adam Smith. Dominated by the verification of the so called curse of natural resource, the mainstream literature on the topic has been...

This paper argues that the assumption of a homogeneous workforce, which is implicitly invoked in the decomposition analysis of changes in welfare indicators, hides the role that schooling and its returns may have on the understanding of these changes. Using Peruvian cross-sectional data for a...

We provide a method to estimate resource shares - the fraction of total household expenditure allocated to each household member - using OLS estimation of Engel curves. The method is a linear reframing of the nonlinear model of Dunbar, Lewbel and Pendakur (2013), extended to allow single-parent...

In this paper we aim to disentangle how sectoral economic growth affects the size of the middle class, using state-level data of Bolivia from 2000 to 2017 and breaking the three main economic activities into subsectors to attain more-specific results. Because the data from Bolivia are limited,...

This study explores the evolution of inequality in Latin America during the COVID-19 pandemic using primary data available from household and employment surveys collected in 2020. Inequality increased on average by 2 percent between 2019 and 2020, twice the average annual growth in the...

How did the financial crisis affect population welfare in EU member states in key dimensions such as income, health, and education? We seek to answer this question by way of welfare comparisons between countries and within countries over time,using EU-SILC data. Our study is novel in using a...

Access to reliable energy is central to improvements in living standards and is a Sustainable Development Goal. This study moves beyond counting the electrified households and examines the effect of the hours of electricity households receives on their welfare. We hypothesize that additional...

This paper aims to assess the extent to which cash transfers, direct taxes, and social contributions help to reduce gender income inequalities in seven Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. We apply microsimulation techniques to household...