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Publications (19)
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– A Harbinger of Political Change?
South Africa has seen a significant increase in the size of the black middle class in the post-apartheid period, but the attitudinal consequences of indicators of the middle class, as of 2011, are inconsistent and modest in size. While members of the middle class are no more likely to hold...
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– Implications for Food System Transformation
We examine the implications of the rise of a middle class in East and Southern Africa for food consumption patterns and the food system. A unique classification of food items shows that highly processed food has one-third of the purchased food market, with comparable shares in rural and urban areas...
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– The Middle Class, Private Sector and Economic Outcomes in Africa
Political scientists have generally seen two key features of African political economies—a relatively small or absent middle class, and a middle class that is unusually embedded in the state—as key explanations of the troubled political and economic trajectories of many African societies. This paper...
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– Evidence from Kenya
Barrington Moore’s famous line ‘no bourgeoisie, no democracy’ is one of the most quoted claims in political science. But has the rise of the African middle class promoted democratic consolidation? This paper uses the case of Kenya to investigate the attitudes and behaviours of the middle class...
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This paper analyses the links between the integration into the international economy and development in Latin America over the past quarter century. It argues that external liberalization led to faster export growth but not to faster GDP or productivity growth. Growth also became more volatile...
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This paper examines the macroeconomic policies and outcomes experienced by the Latin American economies during the period 1990-2010. Macroeconomic policies refer to exchange rates, monetary and aggregate fiscal policies, while macroeconomic outcomes, on the other hand, refer to the patterns of...
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– Honduras, 1991–2007
We examine the drivers of inequality change in Honduras between 1991-2007, trying to understand why inequality increased in Honduras until 2005, while it was falling in most other Latin American countries. Using annual household surveys, we document first rising inequality between 1991-2005, which...
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– Their Impact on Wage Inequality During the Last Decade
Labour market incomes have been a major contributor to the important fall in inequality in Latin America during the 2000s. Indeed, it was the main contributor in countries where inequality fell more dramatically. A proper understanding of the workings of the labour market is necessary to comprehend...
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– The Equalizing Role of Migration and Remittances in El Salvador
This paper reviews the pattern of poverty rates and income inequality in El Salvador since the 1990s. It discusses some of the likely factors that explain the reduction in income inequality that has taken place in the country in the last decade, which paradoxically has coincided with the long period...
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– Rising and Falling Income Inequality in the 1990s and 2000s
This study examines the rise and fall in income inequality in Ecuador over the past two decades. Falling income equality during the 2000s partly coincides with the rise to power of a ‘new leftist’ government, but the trend was already set early in the decade. The recent trend is mainly associated...
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Inequality in Mexico rose between 1989 and 1994 and declined between 1994 and 2010. We examine the role of market forces (demand and supply of labour by skill), institutional factors (minimum wages and unionization rate), and public policy (cash transfers) in explaining changes in inequality. We...
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– Latin America over 1990-2010
The paper reviews the steady and widespread decline in income inequality which has taken place in most of Latin America over 2002-10 and which––if continued for another 2-3 years––would reduce the average regional income inequality to pre-liberalization levels. The paper then focuses on the factors...
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Declining social and economic inequalities since the late 1990s coincided with several basic shifts in Latin America’s political landscape, including an electoral turn to the left and a revival of social mobilization from below. These shifts helped to ‘repoliticize’ inequality and return...
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– The Chilean Experience, 1973-2010
Since the 1970s, Chile has exhibited a highly skewed income distribution accompanied with strong fluctuations over time. Although income distribution worsened notably in the 1970s-80s, a significant improvement was recorded in the first half of the 1990s, resulting from better economic and social...
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This paper offers a medium-term perspective for analysing the trade openness–inequality relationship in Latin America. We present three contributions. The first is that we assemble a database on income distribution indicators systematically estimated from household surveys with emphasis on within...
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This study assesses the evolution of inequality in Uruguay during 1981-2010, considered as subperiods built on the basis of the main policy regimes observed: extreme right (1981-84), centre-right (1985-89), right (1990-2004), and centre-left (2005-10). Income inequality diminished during the...
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