The present research aims to compare and improve the measurement and, therefore, the definition of what "middle class" represents, for a group of countries in Latin America, namely Colombia,Mexico, Peru, Brazil and Ecuador, using a methodology based on the expenditure of households, compared to...

It is widely held that indigenous Chileans experience greater rates of poverty and indigence than non-indigenousChileans, yet the evidence to date has been based on surveys that are not representative by ethnicity. In this paper,we use poverty mapping methodologies that are typically applied to...

Despite two decades of rapid growth, indigenous Chileans are disproportionately poor. However, income data obtained from non-representative surveys yield imprecise estimates of poverty and inequality. This paper therefore estimates poverty and inequality using poverty mapping methods. In...

In the microsimulation literature, it is still uncommon to test the statistical significance of results. In this note we argue that this situation is both undesirable and unnecessary. Provided the parameters used in the microsimulation are exogenous, as is often the case in static...

After a decade of economic and political reforms that dramatically altered the structure of economies in Latin America, poverty and high inequality remain deeply entrenched. Integration into the global economy in the 1990s brought increased prosperity only to a small minority of households in...

In Latin America, privatization started earlier and spread farther and more rapidly than in almost any other part of the world. More, and larger, firms were sold, and more proceeds were raised. Despite positive microeconomic results, privatization is highly and increasingly unpopular in the...

This paper analyzes gender and ethnic differences in vulnerability and resilience to external shocks and stresses in Mexico. Vulnerability and resilience are measured by a combination of the level of household incomes per capita and the degree of diversification of these incomes. Thus,...

This paper analyzes gender differences in vulnerability and resilience to shocks, including climate change and climate variability, for Peru, Brazil and Mexico, which together account for more than half the population in Latin America. Vulnerability and resilience indicators are measured by a...

Accounting for environmental damage is relevant to how one measures the extent and severity of inequality and poverty, and the question of ecological distribution - how the costs associated with environmental damage are distributed across the population - is critical. Following Khan’s (1997)...