This document analyses the evolution of the population coverage and investment of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes, which are poverty reduction initiatives, in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean over the past 20 years. The analysis is based on up-to-date, detailed...

Social protection has become one of the pillars of social development strategies. But, lacking a consistent standard for social protection, the issue has been approached in different ways and from different analytical and policy dimensions. This document examines the principal ongoing...

This paper joins in the debate on the size of the middle class in Latin America, providing an analysis of its structure and characteristics. Using several measurements, it finds that 40-60 percent of Latin American households are middle class, a share which has consolidated over the past decade....

This paper examines the determinants of social spending in Latin America during the period 1990-2012 and how they differed between the years of the Washington Consensus (1990-2000) and the period that followed (2001-2012). Special attention is also paid to the evaluation of convergence towards a...

The Alkire and Foster (2011) methodology, as the mainstream approach to the measurement of multi-dimensional poverty in the developing world, is insensitive to inequality among the multidimensionally poor individuals and does not consider simultaneously the concepts of efficiency and...

This document presents and discusses an extensive set of statistics aimed at characterizing the degree of economic polarisation in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries. The study is based on a dataset of household surveys from 21 LAC countries in the period 1989-2004. Latin America...

This paper presents a comparative overview of mobility patterns in 14 Latin American countries between 1992 and 2003. Using three alternative econometric techniques on constructed pseudo-panels, the paper provides a set of estimators for the traditional notion of income mobility as well as for...

This paper presents a comparative overview of mobility patterns in 14 Latin American countries between 1992 and 2003. Using three alternative econometric techniques on constructed pseudo-panels, the paper provides a set of estimators for the traditional notion of income mobility as well as for...

The seemingly upward trend in opting out from public services and the segregation of income groups in public and private education and health systems has raised concerns about the future of an already fragmented social contract in Latin America. In this chapter, we examine the evolution of the...