Levels and Trends of Inequality

 

To explore how inequality of income, wealth, education, and health looks across several dimensions, access our working papers on the links below:

Seventy-five years of measuring income inequality in Latin America

Wealth Inequality in Latin America

Education inequalities in Latin America and the Caribbean

Health inequalities in Latin American and the Caribbean: child, adolescent, reproductive, metabolic syndrome and mental health

Farm Size and Income Distribution of Latin American Agriculture: New Perspectives on an Old Issue

Some key findings:

• The broad dynamic pattern of how inequality has evolved over time is remarkably consistent, with most countries in the region having followed an inverted U curve between the 1970s and the 2010s (Alvaredo et al., 2023).
• Aggregate wealth has been increasing in countries like Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay, reaching close to 3.5 times the national income for market value estimates and 5-6 times at book values (Carranza et al., 2023).
• International test scores for 15-year-old children (PISA) show that the LAC region has low average quality education compared with other countries in the world. Still, returns to education, albeit decreasing over time, remain extremely high in Latin America compared to other regions (Fernandez et al., 2023). 
• In the last 30 years, the region has shifted from a burden of disease dominated by maternal, neonatal, and communicable diseases to one dominated by non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and increasingly by mental health disorders (Bancalari et al., 2023).
• Latin America exhibits the highest levels of land inequality in the developing world with an average Gini of 0.84. However, there exists a high degree of heterogeneity in patterns of land concentration (Gáfaro et al., 2023).