Template-type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Pablo Astorga
Author-Workplace-Name: Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI)
Author-Email:pastorga1@gmail.com
Title: Functional Inequality in Latin America: News from the Twentieth Century
Abstract: This paper presents a new consistent yearly series of gross income (between-group) inequality Ginis for four occupational categories in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia,
Mexico, and Venezuela over the period 1900-2011 using a newly assembled wage dataset. The approach used differentiates labour by skill level and allows for changing
allocation of the labour force over time. Profits and rents are calculated as a residual. Our regional Gini shows a changing secular process with a reclined “S” shape with an
inflection point around 1940 and a peak in the 1990s. There are mixed country trends in the early and middle decades, but in most cases inequality was on the rise in the 1960s.
There was also a tendency for narrowing wage inequality in the middle decades of the last century – at the time of the Great Levelling in the developed economies – but
whose impact was more than off-set by a rising share of the top group. Inequality in the 20th century is a story of increased polarisation - particularly post 1970 – amid
significant social mobility.
Classification-JEL: N36, O15, O54
Keywords: economic history, economic development, income inequality, Latin America
Length: 47 pages
Creation-Date: 2015-04-10
Number: _135
File-URL: http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/papers/13923/number-135.pdf
File-Format: application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:nuf:esohwp:_135