Over the past decade (2003-12), Latin America has experienced strong income growth and a notable reduction in income inequality, with the region's Gini coefficient falling from 55.6 to 51.8. Previous studies have warned about the sustainability of such a decline, and this paper presents evidence...

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...

The 2001/02 Argentine crisis had a profound impact on Uruguay's economy. Uruguay's gross domestic product shrank by 17.5 percent and the proportion of people living below the poverty line doubled in just two years. It took almost 10 years for the poverty rate to recover to its pre-crisis level....

Income differences arise from many sources. While some kinds of inequality, caused by effort differences, might be associated with faster economic growth, other kinds, arising from unequal opportunities for investment, might be detrimental to economic progress. This study uses two new metadata...

This paper offers an axiomatic characterization of two classes of poverty measures that are sensitive to inequality of opportunity -- one a strict subset of the other. The proposed indices are sensitive not only to income shortfalls from the poverty line, but also to differences in the...

Widespread agreement that poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing deprivations along multiple dimensions, clashes with often vociferous disagreement about how best to measure these deprivations. Drawing on the recent literature, this short note proposes three methodological...

Socioeconomic segregation is often decried for denying poorer children the benefits of positive'peer effects'. Yet standard, linear-in-means models of peer effects (a) implicitly assume that segregation is zero sum, with gains and losses to rich and poor perfectly offsetting, and (b) rule out...

¿Por que editar otro libro sobre educación? Nunca, como hasta ahora, se ha logrado tanto consenso entre tantos actores diferentes en señalar a la educación como el factor aislado más importante para combatir a la pobreza y apuntalar el crecimiento económico. Nunca tantos, en el campo del...

¿Por que editar otro libro sobre educación? Nunca, como hasta ahora, se ha logrado tanto consenso entre tantos actores diferentes en señalar a la educación como el factor aislado más importante para combatir a la pobreza y apuntalar el crecimiento económico. Nunca tantos, en el campo del...

Este libro recoge las memorias del seminario sobre :"Los desafíos de la gerencia social en el siglo XXI: la construcción de sociedades equitativas", realizado el 18 y 19 de Enero en Santo Domingo y organizado por el Programa de Formación en Diseño y Gestión de Gerentes Sociales de...