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This paper first analyzes the performance of Latin America during the long economic cycle that took place between 1998 and 2014, which combined the regional effects of the Asian crisis with a growth phase driven by a supercycle of commodity prices. However, the expansionary phase was followed by a five-year period of economic stagnation, during which previous achievements were weakened, even before the covid-19 crisis erupted, with its negative consequences. This confirms the persistence of the region's economic vulnerability to external shocks, as well as the difficulties in maintaining sustained growth rates associated with processes of structural change, which make it possible to reduce the gap in the development levels vis-à-vis the leading countries and face the challenges of environmental sustainability. It is also pointed out that, despite the important achievements in terms of social development during the recent growth cycle, the high structural inequalities that characterize the region were not broken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the effect of the increase in female employment on income distribution in Uruguay between 1991 and 2012. In particular, this paper studies the impact on inequality and poverty. The methodology employed is a micro-decomposition proposed by Bourguignon et al. (1998). This methodology allows to partially capture the effect of the increase on female employment and to distinguish between effects generated by changes in employment status and those produced by changes in worked hours. Results suggest that, the increase in female employment has had statistically significant effects, despite not being the most important when it comes to explaining the evolution of income distribution. Changes in female employment contributed to reducing poverty levels throughout the period studied and, although it had modest results on de concentration of income at the beginning of the period, effects were more pronounced towards the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Using standard fiscal incidence analysis and the new methodological developments by the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) Institute, this paper estimates the impact of fiscal policy on inequality and poverty in sixteen countries in Latin America around 2010. Methods: With information on incomes, consumption, and other dimensions available in household surveys, and knowledge about the characteristics of the fiscal system, the CEQ method consists in allocating to each individual the burden of personal income and consumption taxes, and the benefits from cash transfers, consumption subsidies, and government spending on education and health. This process yields the pre-fiscal and post-fiscal income concepts of interest. These income concepts, in turn, are used to calculate the corresponding indicators of inequality and poverty. Thus, one can estimate, for each country, the impact of the fiscal system and each of its components on inequality and poverty. Since the methodology that was applied is the same, results are comparable across countries. Results: The countries that redistribute the most are Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Uruguay. Guatemala, Honduras, and Peru are the countries that redistribute the least. Fiscal policy reduces extreme (income) poverty in twelve out of the sixteen countries. The incidence of poverty after taxes, subsidies, and cash transfers, however, is higher than market income poverty in Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, even though fiscal policy reduces inequality in these four countries. Contributory pensions have a heterogeneous effect on inequality and, contrary to some expectations, their impact is equalizing in nine of the countries. In the sixteen countries, spending on pre-school and primary education is equalizing and pro-poor (per capita benefits decline with income per capita). Spending on secondary education is always equalizing; it is also pro-poor in some of the countries. Spending on tertiary education is never pro-poor but it is equalizing in all the countries except for Guatemala. Spending on health is always equalizing but pro-poor only in some countries. Conclusions: Latin America presents a great deal of heterogeneity in the size of the state and the countries' capacity to use their fiscal power to reduce inequality and poverty. A higher share of social spending (to GDP) is associated with a larger redistributive effect but countries with similar, or even lower, shares of social spending show heterogeneous redistributive effects implying that other factors beyond size such as the composition and targeting of social spending (and taxes) are at play. It is important to emphasize that a higher redistributive effect is not necessarily a desirable outcome since in this article there is no estimation of the impact of redistributive policy on fiscal sustainability and efficiency. In some countries, the burden of consumption taxes is such that a portion of the poor are net payers into the fiscal system (before receiving "in kind" transfers in education and health). Governments should examine whether this undesirable effect could be avoided, or at least reduced, through an expansion of targeted cash transfers and/or reduction in the consumption taxes that are particularly burdensome for the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys the recent literature on the methodologies that have been used to evaluate the distributive and poverty effects of trade liberalization in Latin America. Our survey classifies the large number of papers on the subject according to the welfare measure they use: inequality (on wages and household income) or poverty. Our survey shows that a sound methodological approach evaluating the welfare effects of trade liberalization should take into account: the degree of tariff to price transmission, all income sources (not only wages), employment effects, gender and regional heterogeneity of the impact of trade, and second-order as well as general equilibrium effects. Two methodologies represent the latest efforts in this direction: (1) Income generation models with an explicit relationship between changes in tariff and changes in household real income (Porto, 2007), which are capable of testing the different transmission channels linking trade policy and inequality and poverty; (2) The Macro-Micro approach (Bourguingon et al, 2008), which combines a CGE with a micro-simulation model, evaluates the welfare effects of trade policy, taking into account general equilibrium effects. These two approaches can be combined to get the short- and long-term welfare effects of trade policy, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]