Working Paper
Inequality and the changing nature of work in Peru

This paper identifies the socioeconomic drivers of earnings inequality in Peru in the period 2004–18. Using the ENAHO household surveys and data on routine task content of occupations, we apply inequality decomposition methods to the real earnings distribution, its quantiles, and the Gini index.

We find that in this period inequality has reduced, with great improvement attributed to reductions in the gender wage gap and macroeconomic factors. However, we did not find strong evidence for factors related to changes in workers’ attributes or shifts in job characteristics, except for a slight enhancing effect of the task content of occupations, which increases in importance as we move from ‘poorer’ to ‘richer’ deciles.

Supplementary material

Data Appendix