Book Chapter
Introduction: the changing nature of work and inequality

In this chapter we motivate the theme of the book. We first discuss the importance of understanding what drives income inequality in developing countries to explain inequality more generally. We then briefly review the two main competing explanations of inequality factors that prevail in the literature. These are based on the mismatch between the supply and demand for workers’ skills or the changing nature of the tasks that workers perform in their jobs. We also provide an overview of how the studies in this book contribute to this debate in the context of developing countries, as well as the structure of the book.